Facebook and Privacy

I recently decided to deactivate my Facebook account. I did that based on several reports of Facebook disregarding the privacy of users in order to further monetize their platform. To be sure, they have a fantastic platform and I've liked being able to connect with people I haven't seen in a long time. However, hosting user data comes with the responsibility of keeping the trust of the user. To me, for now they've broken that trust. Anyway, I just thought I would post what I sent to Facebook when I deactivated my account:

According to several reports lately from the EFF, Wired, and several online publications, Facebook has consistently changed privacy terms out from underneath users. Part of the reason that I felt safe on Facebook and not in other networks was that I trusted Facebook to some extent. Based on these new changes and the seeming disregard for its users, I would rather not support Facebook any longer. Thank you for the remarkable service, but right now I don't feel that Facebook is trustworthy. They seem like they will do anything in order to further monetize the network/platform, including compromise the trust of its users. It's an unfortunately short-sighted gamble and I hope you will reconsider.

See:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline
http://www.pcworld.com/article/195888/facebooks_antiprivacy_backlash_gains_ground.html

NOSQL

As I've started getting up to speed at my new job at Rackspace down here in Texas, I've come into a new world called NoSQL. NoSQL is a term that Eric Evans re-coined relatively recently and he's since clarified that to mean Not only SQL. It's a term that kind of describes a set of distributed databases that have some similar properties.

Some of the suspects include Google's BigTable, Hadoop's HBase, Amazon's Dynamo, Apache's Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Voldemort, and others.

It seems to be based on the notion that if you have really, really, really large data sets, you run into some boundaries with the limits that a relational database imposes with ACID properties, transactions, and the unattainable triforce of Consistency, Availability, and Partition-tolerance (from the CAP Theorem). Jonathan Ellis blogged about deciding whether you should consider a NoSQL solution here.

So I've started drinking from a firehose of sources to try to understand more about them. We've been looking heavily into pieces of the Hadoop project for its distributed filesystem and Map/Reduce implementation (not exactly NoSQL but siblings to HBase), as well as the Cassandra project because of how it brings together useful features of BigTable and Dynamo and allows for completely horizontal scaling - no single point of failure.

More about the subject:
http://www.royans.net/arch - a blog about scalable web architectures, often talking about big data and NoSQL
http://nosql.mypopescu.com - a blog called myNoSQL that deals with all things NoSQL

list comprehensions in python

One of my favorite features of python is a functional language feature that python itself borrowed - list comprehensions.

I just think it is wonderfully elegant if a language can do something like this:

Example 1:

lines = ['now is the time\r\n']
lines.append(' for all good men ')
lines.append(' to come to the aid of their country\n')

# Does not modify list, returns a new list
lines = [line.strip() for line in lines]

print lines

>>>['now is the time', 'for all good men', 'to come to the aid of their country']

Example 2:

lines = ['<act> is the next act']
lines.append('performing at our show')
lines.append('please give <act> a big round of applause')

print [line.replace('<act>', 'Go Dog Go') for line in lines]
print [line.replace('<act>', 'The Beatles') for line in lines]

>>>['Go Dog Go is the next act', 'performing at our show', 'please give Go Dog Go a big round of applause']

>>>['The Beatles is the next act', 'performing at our show', 'please give The Beatles a big round of applause']

You can do simple operations like strip and replace or even an in place lambda on every element of a list and return that list... all in one line.

I love Python and its functional cousin languages.

hibernate console in intellij idea 9

I was pleasantly surprised to find better hibernate support in intellij idea 9, which was recently released.

They had hibernate support in 8.x, including a console, where you could run queries against your data using the mappings you had configured. However in version 9, they added the ability to use named parameters with associated values. So in essence, you can paste in a hql query and it autodetects the named parameters, e.g. :username. That pops up on the right pane as a named paraemeter. You just double click that, set its value, and you can run the query.

intellij has had support for this in their jdbc console in the past, but it's very handy now with the hibernate console. It removes one step from having to debug queries - you no longer have to use just the sql output that hibernate outputs and then piece queries back together and then try to guess where the disconnect was :).

See intellij feature request:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEADEV-41129

Related to hibernate console, don't forget to have the ehcache.jar in your module's classpath if you want to use the hibernate console. You can find the jar in the basic core download of hibernate - in the lib/optional/ehcache directory of the bundle. The console requires the secondary cache and will give you odd secondary cache errors if you don't have it in the path.

See this about loading ehcache:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-21914

Custom hotkeys in IntelliJ IDEA

Three custom hotkeys I use quite frequently in IntelliJ IDEA:

alt-shift-L - Compare with latest repository version
creates a diff from your copy to the latest version of the current file from the repository

alt-shift-H - Show History
shows the version history of the file with who modified it, revision number, and comments

alt-shift-A - Annotate
annotates the current file with the revision number and who modified each line last - I love this one.

To create custom hotkeys, go to File->Settings->Keymap.

You can find those mappings under Version Control Systems.

Scrum?

So I've been on several teams that refer to themselves as agile. They do scrum meetings each day and get updates from individuals on the team. Presumably, the meeting is for coordination of effort among the individuals.

Scrum seems to work better in some groups - finding holes in requirements, promoting discussion about a data model, general communication to make sure everyone can deliver for the next iteration.

Sound good? Sound normal? Sound effective?

Well I've wondered lately about the cumulative time from all the individuals in the room - that's a lot of work time. That's a lot of disruption. That's a lot of "I'm working on bugs" on some days.

Then today I was reading a passage in the book Peopleware that warns of a balance.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people's time.
...
When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain conclusions. When, instead, the participants take turns interacting with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the whole group is missing; the boss might just as well have interacted separately with each of the subordinates without obliging the others to listen in.

He goes on to say that some ceremonial meetings are necessary, for project milestones, when new people come on, celebrating a release, etc. However, the authors in the same section of the book say:

A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirmation. And it's not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.

Weekly status meetings?!? What about a daily status meeting?

Now I'm not saying that scrum is always a waste of everyone's time. However, I wonder if we in the world of agile are missing the point sometimes and ceremony trumps getting work done. I wonder if many of the same things could be accomplished by having a common work area online, like a campfire chat room or an IRC channel for work discussions. I thought a recent interview (links to page 2) with Jason Fried of 37 Signals was interesting - his take on meetings.

The excerpts from Peopleware come from chapter 33: "The Ultimate Management Sin Is ..." It goes on to talk about all sorts of ways to waste people's time.

I just thought it was interesting to contrast the need in agile for a scrum-like meeting with the need for uninterrupted work time. I think it just inspires thought about whether or not a given meeting, particularly a regularly scheduled meeting, is of value.

An Office Environment

Since I picked it up in grad school, I've been fascinated by a book called Peopleware and the different ways of thinking about the work place.

This morning I read a bit about how a work place or work space affects the productivity of a software developer:

"Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment. The amazing thing is not that it's so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does anything about it."
- Chapter 8, "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here from 9 to 5"

They went on to describe a study they did involving developer productivity. They found the normal 10:1 range of individual developer productivity. What was surprising was they also found that there was a 10:1 or so range for organizational productivity - with two developers from each organization. The two developers from each performed on about the same level.

It would seem that not only individual developer productivity matters, but also their working environment.