Him: “Say, how long have you been writing software?”

Me: “Professionally? I don’t know, something like 8 years?

Him: “And this whole time, have you ever seen a code written that somebody else, and said ‘This here is a beautiful piece of code’?”

I answered that maybe once or twice in my life, and maybe that’s once or twice more than a lot of people. And it’s true. You know it’s true. Pretty much every single time you look at somebody else’s code you’ll go “tzzzk” and point out exactly what’s wrong with it. Sure, it might not be that bad that it needs fixing. But still, I’m pretty sure it’s a very rare event that you checked out a piece of code and thought it was really good. This effect doubles and triples when the code gets stale, to the point where I seriously have to see one instance where one person looks at a five year-old code and thinks it’s any good by any standard.

Thing is, every time a piece of code gets written, there are trade-offs that will be made. Simplicity vs (sometimes speculative) Generality, Design vs Efficiency, you name it. If you and the author are on the opposite sides of a trade-off, you’ll just think that the author was just too dumb to notice what you are noticing. On top of this, there’s the style issue. His screen is 120-characters long, yours is 80 – he’s a dumbass for not breaking his code lines. The other way around, he’s a pretentious douche for going with the strict standard, doesn’t he know we all have 23″ screens already? And oh my God, is it seriously still compiled with JDK 1.3? How dare he not to keep up with the times?!

Honestly, it’s a grim fucking revelation. If you’re a coder who likes what he does, you probably take a minute or two to marvel your creation before pushing it in the repository. You probably thought over carefully all the trade-offs therein, and decided one side for a reason, and to you it is just the way it should be (I dare not say perfect). It’s really sad (about as sad that a coding situation can be) that only you see it that way and that every other person will see something wrong in it, and your successor will curse you no matter how hard you tried to be kind to him via your code.

So here are a few tips on how to deal with the situation.

Tip #1: If at all possible, don’t write code

Yechiel Kimchi, my C++ professor in my freshman year in the Technion, used to say that “2 < 1 < 0″. 2 < 1 means that it’s better to write code once than twice, that’s the plain old DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) we know. 1 < 0 means, it’s better not to write the code to begin with, if at all possible. Next time you’re sitting down to write that piece of code, think! Am I really the first person in the world who tried to solve this problem? Can I use the language API better to reduce the code here? Is there an open-source project that does what I’m trying to do here? Does a similar code exist somewhere in our project, or another project in the organization, and can be extracted to a common toolkit? If you don’t write code, or you write little code, you’re sure that nobody will “suffer” from your code.

Tip #2: Define and stick to conventions

A lot of times what will annoy people will be the simple conventions. 80-wide lines or 100? Break before curly brackets? Break before “else”? Plain tabs or four spaces? Are wild imports OK or not? Spaces before and after binary operators? White lines between groups of imports? Frankly, it doesn’t matter what you decide, but decide; whether in the organizational level, section level, or project level. The style changes in the code usually cause uber-commits in the source-control, and there’s nothing more annoying to see these done back-and-forth.

Tip #3: Code review and/or pair up!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the wonderful Code Review and Pair Programming techniques. These are really, really the basics and are mandatory in any established place. Don’t treat them as a duty, really seize the opportunity to be reviewed. I won’t get into the details on how you should do Code Reviews because (1) that would be long and (2) I don’t think I received enough Code Reviews myself in my career to sound an opinion (I lament that). In any case, Code Reviews take the first layer of crap off, because it ensures that somebody who is not the author (and has bias towards his “baby”) sees the code. The next time someone looks at the code, then, he’s less likely to find stuff that are obviously annoying.

Tip #4: Document your thought-process

Make sure that the non-trivial design choices are documented somewhere. If you’re adding a functionality that might look weird due to a request, add a proper link in the changeset and refer to that request in your Issue Management tool. Be explicit about your choices, be explicit about the options you considered and didn’t take. It’ll be worth its weight in gold (particularly because flip-flops don’t have significant weight) when the next guy tries to figure out why the hell you made the choices that you did.

Tip #5: Two-ways tolerance

When you see someone’s code, don’t be tempted to change stuff on every whim you have. Respect the author, think and try to figure out what went through his mind when he coded it that way. On the other hand accept that your code isn’t perfect, and your trade-offs will be challenged at some point through the life-cycle of the code. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put in all the efforts when checking in your next piece of code. It’s like your child, you do your best to raise it best, but some imperfections will be. And if you don’t believe that I seriously compared treatment of kids to treatment of code, check out the names of my future children.

Like every other early adopter (read: dork) in this planet, I signed up on Google+ as fast as I possibly could, urging a Googler friend of mine to send me an invite back when it was actually a scarce thing. All the initial rave about Google+ was about social, and most of it still is – people think of Google+ primarily as a Facebook competitor.

But we’d be foolish to think that Google would roll out just another Facebook clone with evolutionary improvements such as Hangouts and Huddles. As Vincent Wong, “a first time tech founder” explains in his  awesome slideshow, the Goog aims much higher: it wants you to put your entire world there. Your pictures and videos will be in Picasa Web Albums, your documents will be in Google Docs, you’ll check-in and put your places in Google Maps, you’ll blog in Blogger; and you’ll be able to share these at any point, with whomever you want in your Circles. That sounds pretty awesome.

Again, you might think this is a threat to Facebook. Well, think again. The greatest potential for competition for Google here is Apple. Dubbed “iCloud”, the ambitious cloud storage service was announced (start from minute 79) by Steve Jobs himself in WWDC 2011 and is due to be released this fall. This service comes with a simple but powerful premise: “it just works”. Cupertino really went the extra mile on this one, as it always does; and at least from the demos, the simplicity is staggering. You upload your picture to “the cloud” from any device, and it syncs back to all your devices. You purchase music, edit a document or add a contact; same thing. At least in the demo, it really just works. We’ll obviously see the blemishes once the service actually surfaces, but I think it’s safe to say that Jobs and the gang will deliver on their promise eventually, even if it takes one or two more releases.

Since I joined Google+, I thought I might as well put my pictures to share later with friends, so I spent some time during the past weekend in Picasa organizing my albums. The Google product is awesome, it was a really fun experience and there’s a whole array of options available for the simple user as well as the power user. When it comes to the cloud though, it’s nice, but it misses that extra mile. Picasa allows you to sync your albums to Picasa Web Albums (PWA for short), and the new Google+ options allow you to easily share new photos from virtually any device, but it doesn’t work the other way around – the version from PWA is not synced back to all devices. This means, that your golden image is actually in your hard drive. This seemed so strange to me that I asked about it in Picasa help forums, only to realize that the two-way sync is just not a service provided by PWA.

Yes, this is just one small feature. But it does sort of represent the extra mile lacking in Google’s cloud products. When will we have a Google Docs desktop version, that will sync to online when we get WiFi, and sync back to my iPad seamlessly? I paid $2.99 (which is hard for a Jew like me) for “Web Albums for iPad“, when will such a tool, with more powerful caching and uploading features will be in Google’s portfolio?

The Midas touch of Apple has always been due to the “it just works” approach. On this one though, they really nailed it with the observation that “keeping these devices in sync are driving us crazy”, and I believe they’ll get a great foothold on the new battlefield that is the cloud. Google, on the other hand, has one key factor that will always work for them – most of us still work with PCs since we don’t want to pony up the premium that comes with using Steve Job’s shiny but restricted toys. If they manage to go that extra mile, this battlefield is theirs, and the cloud will drive more and more users to Google+. If they don’t, then Apple will certainly fill the void and leverage the cloud to get even more users to the closed Apple world.

Either way, the users are looking for a brand new world where their devices are synced and backed up always, and where they can create and consume content from anywhere they like. Man, I like being in 2010s.

***

Once upon a time, in a forest far away, all the lions of the forest assembled in a meeting.

The situation was dire, as the food was awfully scarce. “When we attack the monkeys, they run to the trees” they thought. “The elephants are too large, the gazelles too fast, the birds fly, and surely we’re not going to go after the fishes?”. The lions didn’t know what to do.

“Let’s attack the oxen!” one of them eagerly suggested. “They’re big and tough, but they don’t have either claws or big teeth. We can easily overcome them.” And so it was, the herd of lions attacked the oxen.

But things didn’t pan out quite as they thought. The oxen were an organized bunch, they warily defended themselves together, and fenced off the lions.

The lions were hungry. What were they to do? “Let’s consult the fox”, proposed one of them, and so they did. “A piece of cake”, said the fox. “Make me the prince of the pasture in which the ox herd lives, and I’ll solve your problem”. The lions gladly accepted.

The next day, the fox approached the oxen with a white flag. “Dear oxen,” he said. “The lions are a peaceful kind, really, and they like you very much. But do you see that yellow ox over there? He’s the problem right there. His color is too bright, when they see him they get agitated, they must eat him. Sacrifice that one, and solve your problem. Live in peace, live in serenity.”

A tough decision was awaiting the council of the oxen, but at the end they decided to give away the yellow ox. For the greater good, they said. The lions ate happily.

One day passed, and then the second. The fox came again. “As you see,” he said, “the attacks of the lions have stopped”. Then he added: “but that spotty ox over here, so long he’s here, you won’t have peace. They desire him terribly, let them have him, live in peace”.

Once again it was a tough decision for the ox council, and once again they decided to give the lions what they wanted. For the greater good.

The fox came again.

For the ox with the long tail.

For the ox with the white nose.

For the ox with the fat behind.

Took them one by one.

The pasture got sparser, the lions got fatter. One day, the fox didn’t come. Because there was no need, the lion came by himself. “Whomever among you that I want, whomever I desire, you’ll give me him. You don’t want to make any trouble, I assure you” he said.

By then, the oxen were few, and they were scared. They had no choice, their fate was sealed. They thought to themselves: “We were strong, and we were surviving. What in the world happened?”. It was difficult, but finally they admitted themselves the truth: “We lost this war the day we gave the yellow ox away”.

***

I’m not going to be too wordy about the moral of the story. The yellow ox is whatever you think it is. Perhaps it’s the Sudetenland in 1939, and the ox council is Neville Chamberlain. Perhaps it’s the Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip in 2005, and the ox council is Ariel Sharon. And who knows, perhaps it’s the Israel-US relationship in 2010, and the ox council is the Obama administration. The bottom line is, before you attempt to appease anybody, find out what is it that they truly want. Most of the times, it’s not even that difficult to see, but we choose to ignore it to make way for our wishful thinking.

I fired up my browser and typed in “adobe.com”, expecting nothing more than a simple download, and running of an executable. Boy, was I in for a surprise. Adobe requested to install a Firefox plug-in, called Adobe DLM (Download Manager, as it appears). That, in its turn wanted to run another executable, which would finally do the favor of downloading that bloated piece of software at 38MB.

I actually went through the whole process, but when it finished, alas! Adobe PDF Reader was still nowhere to be found. I did have something else, though, called “Acrobat.com” on my desktop. Looking more carefully in the Control Panel, I saw that Adobe also took the liberty of installing Adobe AIR, which I have no idea what it is.

Looking up in the internet to understand what the hell all of this does all of this means, and I found a neat enough explanation here http://blog.sameerhalai.com/archives/adobe-the-next-hijacker/

I either had to go to the FTP site, ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/ and try to browse in there for version, language and my operating systems.

OR, I could simply install Foxit, an alternative product that weighs 5MB rather than 38. It installed in less than five minutes, including download, and from the looks of it, doesn’t fall short at all of Adobe Acrobat Reader. All that, without any of the headache, or the annoyances of continuous upgrade suggestions.

From now on, it’s GhostScript and (apparently) Foxit. You fail adobe. I moved on.

Today, a friend who came back from Singapore gave me an awesome gift – a 2x2x2 rubik’s cube. That surely sounds weird at first, so I’ll elaborate.

About two years ago, while doing a course in the army, I got hold of a Rubik’s Cube. After a while, I got the hang of it (I was taught, of course), and pretty soon I was done having my fun. So, the cube fever stayed dormant for the past two years, up until about two months ago, when a friend of mine showed me Rubik’s Revenge – a 4x4x4 version of Rubik’s cube. I liked it and I wanted one for myself, so I purchased that as well as the Professor’s Cube. Both were solved eventually, with reductions to the original cube – but all in all it’s a nice time killer, invoking some analytic thought, and let’s be honest – supplying bragging rights. So, you can now appreciate why I like the 2x2x2 cube – it completes my set.

This reminded me of what I wanted to do about a month ago, when I wanted to record my thoughts and techniques about solving the cube – so that in the future I may reference them. So, I picked up the dusty HTML file where I left it off, and I started writing.

It’ll take some time – probably one or two more iterations like this, but as of now, I have the solution for Rubik’s original cube (3x3x3). In the meanwhile, you can see it here – Srulix’ Rubik’s Cube Teacher. Enjoy!

A few months ago, I saw a billboard that read the following “Why is there no hospital in Ashdod? Because Olmert is the puppet of the Finance Ministry”, and it also had a sketch in that nature.

Put aside Ehud Olmert‘s virtues as a prime minister, put aside the fact that the billboard was paid for by contractors who were supposed to build the Hospital, put aside even the discussion about the necessity of a Hospital in Ashdod. Let me emphasize – I’m not conveying an opinion regarding any parameters of this specific case. I’m talking about the easiness of “asking more” from the government.

In just the past couple of years, here’s a few financial government decisions that made Israeli people outraged:

• The aforementioned hospital decision.
• The lack of some drugs in the “Health Bundle” (a set of services and drugs that are given free to all citizens of Israel). Notice, we’re not talking about removing drugs from bundle, just the passive act of not adding them.
• Raising the subsidized tuition fee in universities from $3,000 to $4,000 per year.
• Having cut the Military budget and thus hurting IDF’s ability to fight back, particularly in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
• The Wisconsin Plan for dealing with chronic unemployments.
• Not caving in to the Teachers Union’s demands
• Budget cuts in Public Transportation services

I could probably find ten more if I only wanted. I say one last time – I’m not saying which decisions I think are wrong, and which decisions are right. However, I am stating that at least some of them are right.

Back to my point, I must highlight that each of these decisions were disagreed upon by the majority of the country. To the untrained eye, it would appear that either Israel has a great deal of surplus in its economy, and has to spend more money, or that Israeli citizens are wonderful, good-hearted people who only care about the social welfare. Neither is true. In fact, the 50% maximum income tax is a reason of outrage by far above all the others (at least for those who earn past some threshold).

However, since most people fail to see the relationship between income (taxes), expense (all of the above), and the country’s economic status, people return to a much simpler paradigm – spends (“gives”) money – good, saves (“denies”) money – bad. It suffices to look at Binyamin Netanyahu, whose actions as the Finance Minister have brought an end to the recession Israel was is: he’s considered as a “bad guy” by most accounts, at least his financial actions.

This bears a striking resemblance to what children think of their parents. You always get more popularity from the child if you do buy the expensive toy, the snacks, and the new shoes. But alas, the books need to be balanced at the end of the month, so the parent has to rise above the “wants”, and make good financial decisions – otherwise there will be consequences.

Regretfully, this is not the case when running the country – first off, the consequences are usually not to be dealt by the parent making the decision – but by his successor. Second, and yet scarier, in this case the children have the power to select a new parent.

From a game theoretic point of view, which I’m sporting at large at these days, it would appear that each minister of finance, or government in general, has all the incentives to increase the expenses – it makes the children happy. Hats off for the people in charge, who manage to resist these forces.

If you know me, you probably know by now that I was born in Turkey and I speak Turkish (If you don’t, why are you here?). Of all the languages I speak (in any level), Turkish is probably the least appealing grammarwise. It has an immense number of irregularities, and it’s very hard for anyone non-native to pick up the language.

However, Turkish makes up for it five folds when it comes to vocabulary, and in particular – proverbs. Turkish proverbs are the best ones I know, and to me it’s amazing how it uses such vulgar words to describe daily things in a funny way.

I’ll list my favorite Turkish proverbs here. Disclaimer: though I try to verbalize them as nice as I can, these proverbs use at times vulgar words. Don’t proceed if that’s not your thing. Also, there are (many many) more Turkish proverbs, that are not vulgar. You can find them in wikiquote, here I’ll list things that are not appropriate for there.

Number 10: “At yarrağına konmuş kelebek”

• Literal translation: “A butterfly that has landed on a horse’s genitals”
• Meaning: Used to describe a very disproportional situation

Number 9: “Arap yağı bol bulunca kıçına sürermiş”

• Literal translation: “When an Arabian has too much oil, he will rub it on his behind”
• Meaning: “Oil” here means something valuable. When an uneducated person has great wealth, he will use it distastefully (like Nouveau riche).

Number 8: “Eceli gelen köpek cami duvarına işermiş”

• Literal translation: “Ecel” is the time in which a living creature is destined to die. “A dog, whose ‘ecel’ has arrived, will piss on a mosque’s wall”
• Meaning: People who do disgraceful, insulting things are likely to be punished

Number 7: “El sikiyle gerdeğe girilmez”

• Literal translation: “You cannot go to a honeymoon with someone else’s genitals”
• Meaning: You cannot pride yourself for work not done by yourself

Number 6: “Göte giren şemsiye açılmaz”

• Literal translation: “The umbrella that enters to the behind, cannot open”
• Meaning: When things hit the bottom, at least it can’t get any worse

Number 5: “Halamın taşakları olsaydı. eniştem olurdu”

• Literal translation: “If my aunt had testicles, she’d be my uncle”
• Meaning: Used when somebody uses too many hypothetical sentences (“if it was …. then …”). Meant to show that it’s useless to think of improbable conditions.

Number 4: “Gökten am yağsa bize sik düşer”

• Literal translation: “If there were a rain of va***a, we’d still get a pe**s”
• Meaning: Used to describe a very unlucky person/situation

Number 3: “Bahtsız bedeviyi çölde kutupayısı sikermiş”

• Literal translation: “The unlucky bedouin will be molested by a polar bear in the desert”
• Meaning: Same as the previous one

Number 2: “İmam osurursa cemmat sıçar”

• Literal translation: “If the Imam passes gas, the community defecates”
• Meaning: People in leading positions should serve as good examples

Number 1: “Sikilmiş götün davası olmaz”

• Literal translation: “There is no trial for a raped behind”
• Meaning: It is not productive to agonize over something bad that has been already done

These are only some, there are many many more. I may add more later, but these are from the top of my head. If you know others, you’re welcome to post them here.

About a month ago, when I saw couple of people I know (who shall remain nameless) solving sudoku, I thought to myself “I can probably code a sudoku solver before they can finish this”. I didn’t have a computer there and then, but I saw how long it took them (about an hour or so), and I when I came home, I took up the challenge.

The language of choice was Python – since I wasn’t going at it by “brute force,” and instead I was going to use simple deduction methods, I was sure this wouldn’t consist a problem. Also, I thought I might as well solve it for an n by n sudoku (we usually solve for 3×3).

Neighborhoods, Adjacency and Potentials

A simple concept I’ll be using is neighborhood. Any single row, single column, or a n by n sub-square is defined as a neighborhood. A spot (x,y) is said to be adjacent to another spot (x’,y’) if they are both included in some neighborhood. For any spot (x,y) we have potentials – a value v will be in (x,y)’s potentials if no adjacent spot to (x,y) has the value v. Intuitively, these are the values that can potentially be in (x,y).

Step 0 – Just Modeling

First thing I did was model the environment – with spots, potentials, and neighborhood calculation.

Step 1 – Strikeouts

Next thing was placing a set_value(x, y, value) function to the model. The only “extra” I added, was that once you set a value in a spot (x,y), it goes to all neighborhoods of (x,y) and strikes out the value from the potentials. This makes very obvious sense, in sudoku you can’t have one value twice in the same neighborhood. With this in hand, the sudoku solver could already solve the easy sudoku, in 0 time.

Step 2 – Existence

Before we used a simple rule of thumb “one neighborhood cannot have two spots with the same value”. Since the size of each neighborhood is n², and there are n² possible values, it necessarily asserts a second rule – “each neighborhood will have each value once”.

So we can define an “existence-check”: for each neighborhood N, and each value v, check how many spots in N have v in their potentials. If it’s only one, then voila – that spot will be awarded with that value. Applying the existence checks repeatedly, our sudoku solver could already solve the medium and hard sudokus, also in 0 time.

Step 3 – Guessing

Having the sudoku solver beating the hard sudokus, I was feeling rather confident – so I downloaded a “very hard” one, and fed it to the solver. The results were surprising – no success! Looking at the printout of the solver’s “status,” I realized what was the problem – a point arrived in which neither the strikouts or existence checks helped. In fact, there were spots with two potential numbers, and a guess needed to be done. Notice that this will happen in manual solving too – you’ll need to pencil in guesses at some point (for very hard sudokus).

There was nothing that could be done – so I implemented a backtracking method that takes guesses with the smallest branches (try to eliminate as much as possible, and once arrived to a spot with two potentials, take a guess). Notice that practically, the depth of this backtracking couldn’t be more than two or three – since it would take insanely amount of time for the manual solver. However, having the privileges of a machine, I left it unlimited.

The result was a success – I could now solve any sudoku in 0 time.

The code can be found here. Overall, it took a bit more than my wager (I think it totaled at about two hours), but it still was fun. Once I was done, I snooped around the internet and saw that there are many sites that do it, and they discuss “methods” and so forth.

I am still writing this here because I think there’s something nice about my solution – it uses only two trivial rules, and manages to solve the hardest sudoku, in 0 time, in a slow environment like python. It is my hope it’ll be helpful to somebody to spite sudoku-players.

• Cake Jealousy – How to cut a cake n-ways in a fair way?
• Sweet Like Chocolate – Splitting a chocolate bar
• Fair and Square – Multiple square dissection
• Ants – The famous riddle
• Jumping Pawns – Moving an infinite solitaire pawns to a point

For the last two I’d like to thank Yaniv Leviathan, whose page is a great source for cool new riddles.

• I’ve been pretty busy.
• The site was shabby, always getting nuked with spammers.
• A great part of the old site was redundant and it annoyed me to even enter there (let alone post).
• I was too lazy.

The flat-listing doesn’t do a great deal of justice, if I were to create a pie-chart of the percentage of effect of each cause it’d be something like 10-10-10-70, respectively. So in an attempt to get rid of 2, 3, and get rid of the annoying spam mails I’m receiving, I migrated my blog to WordPress.com.

What does this mean? Not too much. The site will look pretty much the same (though I took time to reorder it), but I won’t have to deal with any sysadmin stuff. You’ll see what I’m getting at in a minute – when I explain the process of migration.

Migration should have been easy enough. I opened up an account at wordpress.com (2 minutes), and I immediately recognized the “import” function. Looking at it, I realized that I’ll need a WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) dump of my current blog. I went ahead and fired up my old blog, and looked for an export routine, but alas! No such feature in WordPress 2.0.5.

I looked it up (praise the Lord we have Google), and I found out that this is a new feature that was brought in to never versions of WordPress. So, the solution was now to upgrade, export, and import. The upgrade instructions were easy enough, so I went at it. But, once everything was done – I realized that WordPress 2.5 required PHP 4.3, which my dedicated server didn’t have. Nosing around some more, I discovered that WordPress 2.3 was the last one based on PHP 4.2.2, so I went ahead and downloaded that. But this one, required MySQL 4.0 in order to work, which the dedicated server didn’t have either. Repeated the same, this time for WordPress 2.1, and same thing (MySQL 4.0).

The solution I thought of was dumping my DB, signing up for a free hosting that has MySQL 4.0, install WordPress 2.0.5, then download WordPress 2.3, upgrade, and then export. Thankfully, someone pointed me out that there is a plugin for WordPress 2.0 that does the exporting thing. Once I found that, everything went correctly, and presto, I was home.

Overall for the whole process, time estimated: 15 minutes. Time spent: 75 minutes. I bet this doesn’t surprise any computer person.