Zombie Code

• @techknow: It is a dead end maintaining dead code, unused, and unreachable code.
• @archiloque There is something schrödingerian about dead code: it is often unreachable *until* you remove it.
• @techknow: LOL my question is, if you have dead code in a live site is that considered zombie code or sleeper cell code?

Here I question how evil Google really is when a friend warns me that whatever you say about Google may be used against you by going viral. Google is big brother and it’s CEO thinks we can place our trust in it before our governments. I can’t wait until Google hires Hilary Clinton as the Senior Vice President of the Division of State at Google.

Indexable

• @techknow Google, if you are not evil why you have to make that your motto? Who are you trying to convince?
• @vladgur: Don’t hate Google on an indexable medium.
• @techknow: Good advice, Google’s cache does not forget.

Spaghetti Code is when the code is so convoluted that it’s code path resembles a plate of entangled spaghetti. Here I rant about working with code base that smells like a bad plate of spaghetti.

Code for Dinner

• @techknow: It is possible to make Spaghetti Code out of Obeject Oriented Programmmmmming. Om nom nom.
• @mcory1: Possible? Heck, its pretty easy sometimes, even if you know what you’re doing ;)
• @techknow: I’m working on some code that looks like a cross between Spaghetti Code and Lasagna Code. I need a bottle of wine to digest/debug this.

Chat Roulette is one of those ideas that are so simple that they are genius. Here a friend and I compare and contrast between Chat Roulette and the MTV television show Jersey shore.

Jersey Roulette

• @techknow: MTV or VH1 should do a reality show based on chat roulette.
• @jzy: It’s called Jersey Shore.
• @techknow: LOL from what I have seen of Jersey Shore, I would think they used chat roulette to cast the show.
• @jzy: I was just joking of course, no offense to Chatroulette.
• @techknow: All kidding aside, I think chat roulette is a great idea. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter, I wish they had an open API.

• With any new service there is always a land rush for the vanity url, profile name, and followers?
• The short for Google Mail is GMail. The abbreviation for Google Voice is GVoice. Will Google Buzz be shorten down to GBuzz? What about Guzz?
• Google Buzz is a new opportunity for the race to reach 1,000,000 followers. I hope @aplusk hasn’t heard of Google Buzz yet as it would give me a head start.
• I expected Microsoft to blatantly copy Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare before Google.
• When Twitter first came out Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose had the most followers for the longest time because the early adopters where mostly technologists. But once celebrities and mass media discovered Twitter, and after the stop laughing at the concept, they quickly gained the most followers and brought on new users. Leo Laporte currently has over 6K++ followers. Just wait until Britney Spears gets her buzz on.
• I am not sure how Google will combat the additional spam I expect because of Google Buzz and Google Profiles. But I imagine, spammers and marketers are already hard at work developing spam bots that will follow everyone possible and then it is very easy to figure out peoples email address by adding at gmail.com at the end of you profile user name which is public, visible, and searchable.
• That is the plural of buzz? Buzzes?
• What is the verb of using Google Buzz? Buzzing? Like, “I can’t talk cause I am buzzing right now.”
• What I like about Buzz is that it has not been taken over by marketing and SEO bot accounts, just like the early days of Twitter.
• Does anyone else notice that when you are commenting on a Buzz post the page jumps up and down, kinda like flickering, due to all the updates happening around where you are commenting? There are soo many updates below and above other posts that my comment text box jumps to fit in storm of other comments around it.
• If you don’t like the flickering, I get’s me dizzy after a while, click on the post’s time stamp in the upper right corner. The link is to the page for this one post and it does have the jumpy flickering visible when commenting in the middle of your stream.
• I think that Google and Facebook are in a battle for your friends. But it feels more like a Belfast brawl cage fight… Google and Apple are battling it out in in the mobile space with tit for tat guerrilla warfare… i.e. you can use the word ‘Android’ to describe you app on the Apple App Store. Now Google will suck a lot of the hot air valuation from Facebook. I think Jason Calacanis stated that Facebook lost half it’s value because of Google Buzz… and Microsoft is trying to pick a fight with Google in the search space with Bing but it is not getting much traction.
• I still have not connected my other services into Buzz. I see some people have but they get multiple buzzes (buzz posts) for the same content. It seems like some sort of feed recursion, where the Facebook comment get’s read in by FriendFeed, then read in by Twitter, then feed into Buzz two or three times for each original post, sometimes one buzz post has the same content duplicated. I feel like I need a network architect to help me sort it all out… LOL.
• Following along and contributing to a conversation is so much easier on Buzz than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Not missing Farmville updates on Facebook. This is the longest time I have gone without finding random alien cow on my wall.
• Now that I filter out Buzz messages in my inbox, I can’t find the buzz threads I commented on.
• I’m going to buzz my facebook to tweet my tumblr post on myspace and blog about it.
• Remember when following someone meant stalking… Now it means, friending.
• Having a buzz attack.
• My tweets are still no popping up on my buzz.
• Not liking how tweets show up on my buzz stream, a bunch at a time, in the middle of the night, hours after they were first tweeted. I thought Google had ‘realtime’ access to tweets. I thought Google has access to Twitter’s firehouse.
• There are a few reasons why I like Buzz over Twitter. The ability to edit buzzes after they have been posted and commented on, and the ability to post more than 140 characters at a time. What I don’t like is that, unlike Facebook, you can’t delete comments left on you posts from trolls or stalkers or folks buzzing on their own supply. Even after you block spammers their comments are still visible in your posts.
• There is a lot of negative reaction regarding the privacy failures with Google Buzz. I think that the problem with Google Buzz is not that it is integrated in GMail. The problem is the defaults of Google Buzz, including auto-follow, and public profiles, and the inability to use a public profile name other than your private GMail user name, the blocking functionality does not seem to work, etc.
• Google pulled a Facebook move in terms of privacy… Their motto of ‘do no evil’ did not stop them from doing something so stupid.
• How does one get verified on Google Buzz/Profile? I certify myself. Does my mom need to call Google to verify my identity? What else will Google verify? What I really need is an alibi and some receipts from a convenience store in Albuquerque, New Mexico for last night.
• Ansel Adams would not have had used Flickr, Shakespeare would not had has used Twitter, Ghandi would not have had used Facebook, and Columbus would not have had used Foursquare.. But I am sure they would all have had used Google Buzz.

Software Development

• If your code works not because of your programming intentions but because of bug side effects and your client doesn’t care, it is not done.
• I need a software development bug repellent.
• Design fail if you fix a log message and you break some functionality.
• If a carpenter’s rule of thumb is to “measure twice, cut once” then a programmer’s rule of thumb should be “design twice, code once, refactor a few times, and optimize only if you have to.”
• Saying you know programming is like saying you know how to read, a first grader knows how to read!!
• Requirements gathering is not creative writing.
• I love requirements: The initial instruction should completely initialize the initial value.

Team Leadership

• The only two requirements for a manager is that he is breathing and that he can communicate with his team in their language.
• What happens to you is not other people’s fault, it is your opportunity.
• There is nothing worse than a perfectionist that doesn’t know what he wants.
• The worst thing you can so when you make a mistake is lie about it.
• Every once in a while you have to recalculate, reshuffle, and/or remix your priorities.
• Embrace the edge.

Product Placement

• In Google We Trust.
• Google claims their motto is to ‘do no evil’, put I suggest they change it to ‘do no customer support.’
• If you use Google search to find Google Mail customer support and still can’t find it, is that a fail in their customer support or search?
• There should be Freedom of Information Act for corporations. I want to know everything that Google knows about me and how that info is used
• Can’t believe the AT&T website is not iPhone/mobile friendly.
• Apple should develop a dual screen iPhone, iPhone GS3 DS.
• I imagine a time when Zynga will have in-game ads for Monsanto genetic modified seeds on FarmVille or Foster Farm turkeys for Cafe World.
• Facebook saves everything you create/post/save/click/delete, it can reverse engineer what you where thinking.
• Doing four square drive-by check-ins.
• Does Craigslist have an iPhone app?
• Do you have multiple twitter personality disorder?

Quote

• If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. – Seneca
• If I could make the same amount of money but wake up until when I can’t hold in my pee any longer, I will be a success. – Phil Kaplan
• The answer to the question “where do good ideas come from” is always the same, the come from bad ideas. – Seth Godin
• Only the mediocre are always at their best. – Jean Giraudoux
• From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you… – Brad Feld
• Nothing fails like success. – Arnold Toynbee
• I totally question the conventional wisdom of the American dream. – Anil Dash
• If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin. – Iva Turgenev

• In the future everybody will have their 15 minutes of fame and their own iPhone app on the App Store.
• The App Store app review process will be even more stringent, opaque, and occult. the App Store will require a vial of blood from each iPhone developer.
• Steve Jobs has himself cloned and a disk image of his memories will be implanted in the clone.
• The Apple Tablet shall come with Steve Jobs’ iCommandments.
• The Google Android platform will explode with hundreds of Android phones on the market, and no app review process for apps. Also the first Android trojan horse virus will affect Android users.
• Google will release a Google Phone and become a true telephony company with Google Voice.
• The Google Twins will have a falling out over an argument as to who does less evil.
• Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product and User Experience at Google, will leave Google for her own startup where she will develop the next killer web app which consists of a single search field and no buttons or text.
• Twitter will be hacked, Fail Whale, and Jump the Shark all in the same day.
• Facebook will buy Foursquare only to let it bit rot like Google did with Dodgeball.
• Facebook will allow advertisers to impersonate you and post in your friends wall.
• Zynga will but Facebook and rename it to FarmBook.
• News Corp will buy Digg for $500 Million only to have all the users migrate over to Reddit.
• Paul Graham will be deified by entrepreneurs around the world and will be given a mandatory 3% for $10 of all new startups.
• The US government will award $10 million contract for an installation of WordPress for a government site.

Software Development

• One source of conflict with human computer interactions is that they unsure of themselves, we seek answers and they seek approval.
• What modern Operating Systems need is some level of artificial intelligence subsystem which all applications can use.
• I hate when each application asks the same question, "are you sure you want to exit?" The OS should help apps to be more opinionated.
• Computers prompt us all the time for what smart defaults would do just fine. Computers lack of inteligence is wasting mine.
• Programmers have a form of groupthink, Programmer Think. This is especially true if FUD becomes dogma and design choices are not tested.
• Break Programmer Think, test all assumptions, every design choice, every implementation, every third party library, every different scenario
• If you are testing, have spent two days on a single problem, look in the log file, especially that null pointer exception, chances are that’s the problem.
• Even with all this cloud computing we still can’t forecast the weather accurately!
• First there was the web, the the web 2.0, now the perpetual web beta.
• Going gang busters don’t scale.
• Everything is beta.

Team Leadership

• If you don’t agree on paper, you are not going to agree in code.
• When you don’t take any personal responsibility and make any proper planning, it is always someone else’s fault.
• Seen it happen… Your brains cells are inverse proportional to your climb up the corporate ladder and the resources you manage.
• Each solution comes with a free can of worms!
• OH: you would make a great manager, cause you make a grumpy developer.

Product Placement

• Google can’t commit to a version number that is why everything is in beta. Beta is like a philosophy at Google, testing like a religion.
• Google’s philosophy of the meaning of life, the universe and everything else: Beta.
• This Week in Tech does ads for their ads… to promote the fact that they need to take ads.
• Apple has sold 225 million iPods to date.
• Twitter: If you build it they will come, but if they all come you will epic fail.

Questions

• What happens when someone has buggy code in their test cases, how do you test the jUnit tests for bad test logic?
• Is Mono chasing .NET’s tail lights and .NET chasing Java’s tail light and Java is chasing Ruby’s tail light, …?
• Infinite Shakespeare Theorem: What would get if you have Shakespeare hitting a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time?
• All clicks being equal, is the Amazon affiliate program better than Google Adsense?
• What is your innovation quotient coefficient?
• What is your innovation quotient?
• What name/term has the most website related moniker/naming patterns? e-iComputroniiixr beta 2.0?
• Are social networking sites making you unsociable?
• Is it possible to burn the rice and still have it be under cook?
• Which do you prefer best, an uncomfortable truth or a flattering lie?
• If you can have any view from your back porch, what would it be?