Singularity Song

How amazing progress been!
Full of miracles unseen.
Went all way into to the deepness.
And all way into the sheen.

Stopping all the vanity,
All the troubles gone.
Cherishing humanity,
Robots grubbing on.

How amazing progress shined!
No more sore for human kind.
No more labor for your body.
No more struggle for your mind.

Stopping all the vanity,
All the troubles gone.
Cherishing humanity,
Robots grubbing on.

How amazing progress beamed!
There was always time regime.
Now you spend it all on travel,
Whether real or in dreams.

Stopping all the vanity,
All the troubles gone.
Vanishing humanity,
Robots living on.

(Transcribed from Приключения Электроника – До чего дошел прогресс)

Constructive News

It’s important to mention that I consider myself an info-mole. I’m addicted to thinking, discovering new data, researches, speculations and connotations. I continuously consume information from social media, news outlets and periodicals (much less from books, as they are often outdated). This lasts since I remember myself, and will hopefully last until I stop doing.

At some point I realised that information is an independent value, not necessarily related to data, knowledge, opinion, etc. I started viewing information as fundamentally indivisible from its production and consumption. Information for me became a captured or projected process of transferring data or knowledge from agent to current or prospective observer^[2]. Information is generated at source to be absorbed at target. So each quantum of information for me has a purpose.

That may sound a bit too abstract, but I apply this approach both as motivational explanation of social communication, and as a way of interpretation of environmental phenomena in general. And the purposes are just two: distributing physical energy and maintaining entanglements (while the second can be also reduced to the first one deferred).

So, in the context of personal information consumption I empirically stabilised the analytic approach to each piece of information that becomes available for me:

1. Who is sharing the information?
   • The chaining source agents of each piece can be multiple;
2. Why is it shared by the agents?
   • Explicit, implicit or unintended purposes;
3. How does it affect the observers?
   • Myself or other actual or potential consumers.

Let’s take a random article from Google News for analysis… WTF Google News? What is this pathetic junk? Your information is completely useless. News are generated by a graph incompetent bloggers. They post their essays for traffic conversion and social coverage. As cheapest emotions to touch are fear and disgust, the major result of these articles is bad mood of the reader. They don’t offer an objective view on the topic or present a balanced spectrum of opinions. They amplify problems and don’t suggest solutions.

I don’t appreciate this kind of information. I’m used to and wish to continue to consume information for curiosity. Or information that helps me make decisions. Or information that confidently exposes risks. News outlets fail with it miserably (luckily there are other resources online, that are better, but sometimes I tend to think the set is shrinking).

So I’m stating my wish, hope, request and demand to you, o Internet of People: Do good. You can compile the same information in a way that can suggest a constructive action. And by that I mean, that if hypothetically all followed your advice, the world would at a step become a nicer place for all.

• I demand writers to learn that spreading evil and useless information hits them back and focus on kind and constructive.
• I request readers to learn that accepting information without evaluating the author, the purpose and the effect makes them vulnerable to evil and useless information that weakens them.
• I hope both sides will realise they are of comparable scope – for reader the author is a neighbour and not an abstract trumpet, and for author the reader is a neighbour and not an abstract “crowd”.
• I wish attention and advertence of all to spring and blossom.

So I could quietly continue to do my info-digging without wasting time and effort on filtering tons of annoying depressing bullshit.

Thank you in advance.

Cycle of knowledge

0 – ignore
1 – try
2 – repeat
3 – assume
4 – ensure
5 – conclude
6 – utilize
7 – canonize
8 –  accustom
9 – neglect
10 – forget

Le

Few months ago I suddenly noticed that many popular brands have -le suffix in their names. Beatles, Deep Purple, Oracle, Apple, Google… Any more examples?

Making Collective Decisions

While preparing to shrink up and replace my single role of Lead Software Architect with a Software Architecture team –

Decision Making

Making architectural decisions might seem easy and fun, but can have multiple consequences which can affect state and integrity of the software, the architecture team, the R&D teams and the whole company. We aim to make the decisions in the most responsible manner with taking all the relevant factors in consideration. Sometimes we do consult wide community of developers and PMs in early stages, sometimes we do that on later stages, but what’s very important, we never attempt to dictate our decision without majority consensus. The common flow of taking a decision is the following (CRAFT): Collect information about the subject from provided private and public sources. If necessary, use in-company resources reuse their existing experience. Research the gathered information and prepare a draft of architectural opinion with a list of alternative solutions and their advantages and disadvantages. Acknowledge the opinion of all the interested parties. Accept and react on all the provided input. Finalize the decision and make it effective. Make sure it’s acknowledged, accepted and adopted by all the relevant parties. Track the execution of the decision. Learn from the experience, reopen the flow if necessary.

Phing plugin for Eclipse PDT

I love Ant integration into Eclipse JDT – it provides smart editor, handy auto-completion, and the most important – fully functional debugger.

Recently I have been laboring on porting a deployment system from shell scripts to Phing, a loose PHP port of Ant. And naturally, I miss the above. I still get a little aid from Eclipse – since Phing’s syntax is very close to Ant’s, I can at use Ant editor for Phing files to enjoy property navigation and target integrity validation.

I would be more than happy to announce that I’m going to fill the gap and implement Phing plugin for Eclipse PDT, but unfortunately – I’m too busy and too lazy. On the other hand, if you, my dear friend, will suddenly decide to accept this challenge, I can gladly invest my time in architecture, design, review & testing free of charge. 🙂 Or should I anyway try to start it myself?

Heart-Touching Quotation

…When I was going to school we were always taught, “In the olden days of computing, computers were expensive and programmers were cheap. Now it’s the reverse. Therefore…” We are back to the future. At internet scale, programmers are (sometimes) cheap compared to the cost of electricity.

Kent Beck

Moving on

Today was the 1st day of me working in the new company (yes, my dear friend, I bid farewell to Nielsen Online) – EasyToBook GmbH – as Software Architect. Unfortunately I’ve got no chance to either design any architecture or to develop any software yet, but succeeded to meet nice and talented people and spent some sweet time reading the documentation.

Programming in Scala

Got the Programming in Scala eBook. I hope to get time and build an experimental Eclipse Plugin with it.

Zend Studio for Eclipse Release & cetera

Dear diary,

I have 2 news for you today.

1. Today we successfully released Zend Studio for Eclipse. My contribution to it, beyond PDT commitments, is Sebastian Bergmann‘s PHPUnit testing framework integration plug-in, File Network support, Organize Includes and other parts of Refactoring engine, Code Coverage browser… well, it seems that’s it. Maybe several additional, but minor things. Enjoy, guys. This is really a great (and some say – the best) PHP IDE.
2. Occasionally, these are my last days at Zend Technologies. Since next week I’m starting at Nielsen Online (BuzzMetrics) to do text-mining. If you ask why, the answer is simple – I got bored of Zend, where I spent last 6.5 years of my life, and wanted to do something really new and exciting. I hope it will work 🙂 For now I’m planning to stay an Eclipse committer and continue to help my brothers at Zend to move on.