Omer Gertel's Blog - Latest Comments

Re: How To Read Code

nurnur — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:01:54 -0000

Grrrreat article!! Thank you. I am implementing your tips right now. The book you recommended is also very good, I keep getting back to it for coding principles.

Re: Messing Around With Images

Omer Gertel — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:03:10 -0000

Doh! Fixed (apparently when you try and draw beyond the borders of the canvas, Firefox throws an exception, and chrome just does its best).

Thanks for notifying me.

Re: Messing Around With Images

Yuval Adam — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:12:40 -0000

Hmm, doesn't work on FF4?

Re: Google VS Facebook: A Battle Over The Internet’s Architecture

Promotional Products — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:02:08 -0000

I believe Google will always be unbeatable... even though Facebook comes closer in competition with Google, we must remember that Facebook is defined as a social network & Google is apparently a search engine. Therefore, both have altogether a different purpose.

Re: A Tale of Two Databases

Ofer Shapira — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:10:26 -0000

There is a solution for database managment, also israeli dev. - called DBMaestro.

where i work, we use it.

Re: A Tale of Two Databases

Roee Eliezer — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:52:40 -0000

You so right, but there are few tools that enable manage your data.
This market is only at the beginning but I am sure it going to grow (regardless the fact that I start to work on such product).

Re: Honing my Craft

Omer Gertel — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:18:10 -0000

Amir, the education system was designed in the 18th and 19th centuries to prepare people to join the work force. I'm not surprised that the academia is trying to prepare the students to use the common tools of the day. The surprise is that they do not do a very good job at that.

We should separate computer science from software engineering (or software craftsmanship). We are no longer in the early days of computers, and it's time to start specializing.

Re: Honing my Craft

Amir — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:54:48 -0000

Great read. I too began my programming ways in BASIC (only I played with sound) and continued into Pascal. Our paths diverged around the end of high school. I started learning Prolog, which I hated then but I am thankful for until this day. Instead of heading for the uni I went straight to BigCo for a few years.. and then went to uni for a first and currently second degree in CS. Before my degree I wasn't that great on systematic order in the systems I worked on (*cough* to the say least), but I believe that in order to build a tall and strong building you need a good foundation. CS is that foundation. I've gotten better at being tidy with my code and using patterns for structure but more importantly, what my code does and how it gets it done is drastically better. The solutions I conceive are orders of magnitude more efficient. Moreover, now that I have CS knowledge - some problems I wouldn't even consider tackling before now seem like a few weeks worth of thought.. if not completely trivial. On the other hand, systems I had previously considered to be trivial I now understand to be more-than-meets-the-eye (such as writing a new RDBMS for BigCo :)
Separating form from function - while the form of what I've done got better as a function of how much code I wrote, the functionality got better as a function of my progression in the academia.

In a nutshell - Design patterns can change, the current fashion in languages (and their families - i.e. functional vs procedural) changes on a whim, even NoSQL vs SQL. However, the foundation rarely changes. If anything - it gets wider and deeper.

Unfortunately the industry has pushed schools to teach some current technologies, such as java or a specific RDBMS's SQL implementation, because the industry doesn't want to train the newly minted 'programmers' coming out of the university. It's an issue of time, and therefore money. At BigCo, you were given time to read on Big-SQL-DB-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (Oracle). At most industrial organizations, they don't want to invest that time in you. They see you as a worker, so the minute you are hired you should get to work. They don't care about the difference between what you know and what you can do with what you know - the epitome of Big Org ignorance. Industry has succeeded in pushing this training period back to the degree. They regain their initial investment, you lose yet another course in machine learning, graphics processing, digital systems, computer architecture, advanced algorithms and structures etc. Which, eventually, comes back to bite industry in the ass because when you finally do need to learn these algorithms you do it in 5 hours, with lunch and other disturbances, and you eventually use someone else's implementation whose parameters you barely understand. Did I say they're ignorant?

You can see this instantly by the companies led by engineers - Google, FB and others. Even after 15 years of experience they ask how you would sort a million integers, how many tennis balls bit in a school bus and the average flying speed of an unladen swallow. They care about how you think, not the language you think in.. because when you're faced with a unique problem it's your raw problem solving abilities that take effect, not the language you use to write the solution in.

BTW The monty python link right after \Normalization?\ was hilarious!

Re: Facebook Is Going To Be The Next Big Thing. Again.

JustJss — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:49:39 -0000

Out of 150+ friends, the few (of all ages) I know who have "stuck" to facebook fall into two small groups:

1) Hopeless Farmville addicts. Once a large group, I think I'm down to single digits.

2) People who have something to sell and think that they HAVE to be there.

I thought I was in the second group, but as it turns out -- I don't have to be there. I feel bad for friends who tied up their identity with FB at the expense, in time, of building their own.

Unless you're Zynga, et. al. ...

Facebook + You = ... Facebook.

It has its uses, of course. It's worth having. It's just not worth a lot; and at some point, the numbers will start to show it.

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

Omer Gertel — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:07:17 -0000

@Mike - Oops, Got me. Fixed.

@Ivo - You can watch this video on TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/la...

I don't like TED's embeddable object, so I used YouTube.
BTW, this is the ultimate irony: The video is blocked because of a 2 second snippet, which is trying to explain why Fair Use is so important. It was taken down, automatically, and without any inquiry about the legitimacy of the use.

@Ofri, as usual, I agree with you. You rock, man.

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

lasersocks — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:39:32 -0000

scary stuff for sure. unless we as a people do something, the rest of our lives will become less and less free.

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

Ivo Wetzel — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:28:00 -0000

The whole copyright thing is getting out of control, it literally shouts out pure capitalism. In the end you just get less, for more money.

You cannot stop piracy, there will always be people which either cannot afford a product or just outright refuse to pay for it. The more you do to protect your work, the more you annoy the normal user, which after all, actually bought your product. More barriers also mean more challenge for the crackers, which as we all know have more than enough time to break/circumvent it.

Oh and I'm sorry but I can't watch the video :/

"This video contains content from UMG. It is not available in you country".

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

Mike — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:13:08 -0000

I think you meant to say piracy "is NOT to be condoned." All in all though, a well argued post.

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

Loup Vaillant — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:37:46 -0000

A book (and an XBox, and many other things) is made up of two parts : the material (paper, silicon…), and the knowledge embedded in that material (text, firmware…). While ownership of material is a well known concept, ownership of knowledge is a meaningless one. Knowledge isn't owned, it's known. Knowledge isn't shared, it's spread. Knowledge isn't destroyed, it's forgotten.

Up until recently, knowledge was always embedded in some material, with no easy way to transfer it to another. Because of this tight coupling, dealing with the material felt like dealing with the knowledge itself to the unwary. Knowledge and matter didn't feel so different.

Now they do. And refusing to acknowledge it is either foolish or evil.

Licensing is such a refusal: it tries to rent knowledge. Meaning, it more or less tries to prevent you to teach its teaching. Or to make you forget it. This can't work but in the tightest dictatorship.

Re: Do You Own Your iPhone?

Ofri Raviv — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:56:16 -0000

Do you know if MS crippling its XBOXs has ever been put up to court?

James Boyle points in his (free as in speech) book The Public Domain to what seems to be one of the major causes of this shift: For years copyright has been the internal regulation of the publishing industry. To infringe on someone else's copyright in any meaningful magnitude you had to be a publisher yourself. In that time we have been accustomed to letting that industry set its rules for itself. With the advance of technology stuff have changed - as you write, simple usage needs copying, every person can make endless number of copies of a work, etc.

I think the solution is in customer deman to be owners of their products and regain their freedoms, but your prologue is way too optimistic. We haven't reached a new working equilibrium. How many people do you see switching to linux, just because its free (as in speech)? On the smartphone market, where more users are early adopters, we see that people are choosing android mainly because of openess (which can be doubted, but still).

Re: Democratizing Taxes

Amir — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:46:44 -0000

Interesting idea !

Re: Virtual Reality, Not What We Have Imagined

Shalev — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 16:57:58 -0000

the glove technology was very real when Minority Report was filmed. actually, on the scenes when this device appears, the actors really interfaced with a computer display, probably placed behind the cameraman, showing something similar to what we saw on those CGI glass displays in the movie.

Re: How To Read Code

technikhil — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:16:49 -0000

There is one aspect of code reading that one must consider. In the real world you don't generally have the luxury of reading self contained code snippets. Sometimes you get a large bunch of inter-connected code or an conditional statement that runs several pages or even a large class hierarchy.
In such cases the more appropriate description of the activity you are doing become "code comprehension" - I write about this in more detail in my post - check it out - http://technikhil.wordpress...

Re: How To Read Code

Omer Gertel — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:51:03 -0000

Actually, modern practice is not to use comments, but make the code self descriptive. This has a few good reasons:
A) In modern languages code is much more readable. Think of python, ruby, Java and C#. Object oriented, high level languages are easier to read.
B) Comments are usually not updated when code changes, which makes them worse than waste. They actually hurt understanding. Comments should really last resort.
Contrary to previous comments, about a function being called only once, it is actually a great way to make the code readable. For example, if you have an if statement - you can create three functions to describe the if statement, and then you don't need a comment at all:

if (OrangeIsRipe(color, size)) {
MoveToBoxing();
} else {
ThrowAway();
}

Re: How To Read Code

gary knott — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:39:55 -0000

Why are we reading code? Isn't the purpose of comments
to help us avoid reading too much code?

-- See www.civilized.com/programmi...

Re: Economists’ Little Secret

Jakob Jenkov — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:20:57 -0000

@Gal:
You said:

"We both understand that if some âmoney chaserâ make 50$ per hour, someone else loss 50$ per hour. and what if this person really need this money for surviving?"

This is so wrong. Wealth creation is not a zero sum game. The more we all work, the cheaper everything gets, the more everyone is able to buy. EVERYONE.

Don't think \Zero Sum\. That's what socialists do.

Thinking \Zero Sum\ makes people obsessed about \wealth redistribution\.

Think \Plus Sum\ (variable wealth) makes people think \wealth creation\.
And \Plus Sum\ is how economics work. Not Zero Sum.

Re: How To Read Code

Pl4n3 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:56:28 -0000

Great read! Though, splitting functions, not generally makes code readable to me. If new funcs after a split are called only once, i would keep it as code-block in the calling function. Otherwise stuff is too much spread and has misleadings semantics (a function is meant to be generally usable and to be called more than once).

Re: How To Read Code

Ralph — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:50:18 -0000

The sad part is the code itself.

Input is not limited to positive numbers - entering a negative number will give meaningless results.
Todo: limit input to positive numbers, use unsigned int variables.

If a rather large max value is use, the resulting sum will overflow - again giving meaningless results.
Todo: limit input to largest number that will sum to maximum int value.

If your loop is iterating through every value, use a for loop. If not, then use a while loop. The while loop here adds extra code that is not clarifying what the code is doing.

Doesn't matter where your eyes are going if you can't fix these things!;-)

Re: How To Read Code

Andrew J. Leer — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:58:51 -0000

I used to go to Vision Therapy (which I later found out the problem had more to do with my TMJ than it did my eyes), and they used a vision tracking system to watch how my eyes moved when I read something. The apparatus looked like a circuit board that fit around my eyes, it wasn't bulky at all.

I was really surprised when I looked at the results of how my eyes were scanning the page, I don't think that I was even aware of the course they were taking.

Re: How To Read Code

Rick — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:24:58 -0000

Thanks for the good post. You have furthered our profession!