I’ll be heading over the the City to check out the SF New Tech Belly Up tomorrow night, and hanging out with my buddy JJ Behrens.
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Author: Leon
It’s April Fool’s Day, and out come jokes from popular Web sites. Google usually does a few things. This year they have something called Custom Time, a feature for Gmail that allows you to send the email with a date in the past. It’s mildly amusing, and probably feasible to implement, actually. But one thing stuck out to me: the fake testimonials feature an honest philosopher and a dishonest investment banker.
What’s up with that? Isn’t it more likely that the philosophy professor would say something condescending and illogical, such as “Despite what your feeble mind might tell you, time travel must be real because we can imagine it.” The Investment banker should be saying, “In recognizing investments, timing is everything. With Custom Time, I can send that email to that Zuckerberg kid and tell him I will be helping him fund his silly dating site for college kids.”
All I’m saying is, it isn’t nice of Google to add yet another smear on businesspeople, perpetuating a false stereotype. It’s especially true since Google would not have been successful at all without the help of investment bankers. Epistemology Professors likely have had little or no impact on Google.
There’s a general principle to optimization that many people miss, but seems so simple once you know it. I’m sure I first read about it in The Practice of Programming
I’ve found that this approach applies equally well to optimizing money. For example, when you’re running a business, you have a range of expenses. Some of them are for tangible goods, some of them are for outside services and some of them are for salaries. Imagine an office with a fancy coffee maker. Everyone might think it’s a waste of money and a luxury, but the cost of that expense is likely minuscule compared to salaries. You’re usually better off figuring out how to improve efficiencies in your work process than going with cheapo amenities.
Of course, once you know how this work, you can use it deceptively. Politicians do it all the time. Watch how they talk about earmarks, or the apocryphal $100 hammer. You might agree that it’s not a good idea for a congressman to request a $1mil earmark for his wife’s employer, but even $1mil is nothing compared to the most significant costs to the U.S. budget: Social Security and Medicare. If you check the measurements, you’ll find that all the earmarks together total about 1% of the budget, which Social Security and Medicare are about a third. (Total federal spending is about $2.9tril, and Social Security plus Medicare is about $900mil).
I’m a relatively young person in my late 30s. I wonder if I’m not alone in counting on getting absolutely nothing from Social Security by the time I might need it. I’m not taking that chance. I’m saving money in a 401K plus whatever else I can beyond the annual limit of a 401K. I really wouldn’t mind if my taxes were 30% lower and I had to take responsibility for my own retirement.
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Iraqis Liberated From Bad Ideas
Last week, the New York Times ran a story on Iraq with the premise that the religious ideas of Islam are being tested and rejected. The author, Sabrina Tavernese, used the phrase, “the American liberation”, which is only remarkable because the reputation of the NYT is that of promoting the idea of the war as a failure. While the war has a definite strategic purpose for the USA, I cannot think of a better achievement of the Iraqi people than for them to move past the outdated ideas of religion.
Here are a people who truly are liberated from a religious or military dictator, finally able to decide for themselves what to think. The laws of Islam have been dramatically exercised in Iraq. To a free man, the idea of screaming “God is great” as you chop off someone’s head is not appealing. In fact, the ideas of the clerics lead only to your own destruction.
When Bush talks about a forward strategy of freedom, I’m not sure he totally understands it. But a disillusionment of religion is exactly the kind of freedom I was hoping for.
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March 2008 PHP Meetup
At the suggestion of my buddy Lee Springer, I hung out with the PHP geeks at the SF PHP Meetup in the CNET building last Thursday night. A couple of Zend guys talked about version 1.5 of Zend Framework. It was good to get a view into what they are up to, although in many ways they are making a super robust version of the techniques I was implementing about 10 years ago.
Oh man! It just hit me that it was about 10 years ago that I started writing the first edition of Core PHP Programming! Yikes!
There were about 50 people who showed up. That’s impressive based on my experience from years ago with the old PHP users group that dwindled into nothing. A guy named Mariano Peterson came up to me and recognized me as the author of Core PHP. That was cool! Michael Tougeron also made a point to say hello to me. He’s looking to get me to talk at some point, but I’m not feeling like a something significant to talk about.
The most remarkable part of the session was when someone asked if the new Zend Forms code filtered input for SQL injection attacks. Terry Chay spoke up about this, saying quite correctly that you should prepare data with escaping at the moment you send the data out. If it’s going to the browser, convert special characters to entities. If it’s going to the database, escape the special characters right before you assemble the query. You don’t want the mess we had many years ago with magic quotes.
Then, Terry made what seemed like a nonsequitur. After explaining how you would protect you Zend Framework app from SQL injection, he declared “I hate Zend Framework, but that’s how you’d do it.” That made me smile. He later clarified that he hates all frameworks. I can appreciate that attitude. I know I sometimes feel like frameworks are a solution looking for a problem. I’m not even sure if FreeEnergy is a true framework or just a set of idioms.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be showing up to the meetups now. Next time I’ll plan on staying later and chatting with more people.