bailouts
I usually try to avoid preachy blog postings, but I can't help it today. Blame it on "casual Friday" or something.
Like lots of people, I'm pretty angry about the government using our taxes to bail out Wall Street incompetence. But now I've gone from angry to pissed-off. Here's why ...
The Dot-com bubble crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.[11]</p>Recent research suggests, however, that as many as 50% of the dot-coms survived through 2004, reflecting two facts: the destruction of public market wealth did not necessarily correspond to firm closings, and second, that most of the dot-coms were small players who were able to weather the financial markets storm.[12]
Not only do I work for a dot-com survivor, I work for one of the most bruised, battered, and beaten-up dot-com survivors. I mean, just check out our stock chart! I haven't asked around the office for official corporate history or anything, but I'm pretty sure no-one remembers getting a couple billion dollars from the government while the company lost close to 99% of its market value, but I have been told there were weekly, if not daily, downsizing announcements.
Now I'm not jealous or vindictive on the part of my company - I wasn't even around for the toughest times. I'm just making a point here that market "catastrophes" and "crises" have happened, happen, and will always happen. Sadly, people will lose their jobs, their wealth, and their houses. In the case of the dot-com fallout, $5 trillion worth on Wall Street alone plus whatever subsequent losses are tallied.
6 weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office said taxpayers would need to spend $25 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now we are seeing figures up to $700 billion. The figure could very well balloon to beyond the $5 trillion lost in the dot-com burst, no-one really knows - not you, not me, not Wall Street, and not Washington.
So why are we even considering footing the bill for this when no-one even knows what the total is, how it's going to be paid, or to whom we pay it? Obviously there are some very powerful financial market players gaming the system. They are not the "small players who [are] able to weather the financial markets storm."
It would be interesting to see if the Financial/Credit/Mortgage-Lending industry follows a Long Tail distribution. Might be a case of the tall head exploiting the public to avoid their necessary chop down to obscurity ...
unit tests and just-got-it-working inertia
I've been reading and enjoying The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. It has re-ignited some of my passion for Test-Driven Development.
This morning I finished a first phase of "refactoring" some code architecture and found myself extremely hesitant to dive straight into the next phase. I think it's because the extent of my "testing" was to tab over to the fully-functioning web page and refresh after each code change. That's pretty much an "all-or-nothing" scenario.
And the thing about all-or-nothing scenarios is that once you've achieved the "all" state, you're very hesitant to go back to the "nothing" state. Maybe I'm starting to understand one of the benefits of unit tests as opposed to whole-sale acceptance tests. With smaller unit tests, you can move more concretely from nothing to something, then from something to something a little more, then finally to all done.
Brasil
One of the great things about working for a big-name web company is that you get big opportunities. I'll be speaking at PHP Conference Brasil '08 about how we use PHP at SourceForge.net. Needless to say, I'm very excited and planning some vacation time around the conference.
Open source is big in Brazil. And even more pertinent, Brazil is our 3rd-highest nation in terms of site traffic - after U.S.A. and Germany.
Hopefully I can try to overcome the language gap and present some informative material for everyone. One of the things that struck me when I joined SourceForge.net was that the site code isn't super-magic - it's really quite ordinary PHP, it's just very highly used.
Ubuntu FTW; Boot Camp FTL?
quick update on my ubuntu experience ...
webex went fine. linux client seamlessly downloaded and allowed me to join a webex conference. joined the teleconference via skype with just a small hiccup - took me a couple minutes of tweaking with various sound levels to get my mac's built-in mic going. but iSight camera was working with Skype straight away, so that was nice.
but, near the start of my first full day, I needed to investigate an IE bug, so I tried booting up into my Windows partition. epic fail. blue screen immediately upon boot. :( tried fixing my mbr via the Windows XP install CD, but no luck with that either.
I remembered that the ubuntu instructions for triple-booting suggested installing GRUB on the partition with ubuntu, and I also remembered that I had missed that step. so, I decided to reset and start all over again. I booted into Mac OS (no probs there - in all of this experimentation I never once had a problem booting into Mac OS), and used disk utility to destroy both my ubuntu and windows partitions.
this time, I tried the other (easy) approach and after installing Windows, I ran ubuntu installer. this time I remembered to install GRUB on the ubuntu partition, rather than defaulting to the mbr. however, when I booted up again, I had the same experience - Mac and Ubuntu would start up fine, but Windows failed to start again. :(
because I constantly need to test in IE every day, I sadly decided that I needed to stop with all the experimentation and just resign to using Ubuntu on my secondary computers. :(
it's too bad - I would love to have a triple-booting MacBook Pro, especially if I could fire up both my Windows and my Ubuntu systems inside a parallels or fusion vm.
Ubuntu FTW?
I picked up an Ubuntu CD at OSCON and have now installed it on my macbook pro. I have no qualms saying this version (8.04) is easily the best Linux experience I've ever had...
I had to connect to ethernet to get first batch of updates which also let me get ndiswrapper and appropriate driver for my wifi card.
once I had that, wifi connected and it was a single apt-get command to get the proper bluetooth module so my mouse would work. then I started downloading and playing with the new compiz stuff. I have to say, compiz effects blow away Mac OS X effects, though they're not quite as pragmatically integrated into everyday uses.
I fired up pidgin and got connected to our company jabber and my google talk account. similar simplicity and ease with Evolution for company email (though I also started trying Zembra Desktop since OSCON).
our setup at sf.net is kinda unique in that we have our own sandbox sites that we can access and edit via webdav, so I did a simple apt-get for davfs2, made the necessary mods to /etc/fstab and I was able to vim edit some code. but I decided to go looking for linux php editors. I tried bluefish and jedit and liked jedit much more - its performance with the webdav-mounted dir was much better.
I also exported my del.icio.us bookmarks and imported them over into Ubuntu firefox. and I installed GnomeDo because I'm a quicksilver junkie.
total time was probably 2 hours or so - much better than any of my other previous jaunts into Linux. large credit to the high-quality ubuntu wiki.
so I'm thinking to try out a full day of ubuntu tomorrow. my only concern is webex, though there is a native Linux client.
