Shadowlessness

I just finished the “His Dark Materials” trilogy that I’ve already written about. Since I don’t want to spoil any of the story actualities here, I can say only two things about the series.
The ending was really really sad. I’m not talking Hamlet sad, were everyone dies except the kangaroos. I’m not saying that all the main characters die or something (although some do die) but it’s saturated with another kind of sadness. The final chapters are so saddening that I put off finishing the ending chapter for a week or so. I quite liked it (not the end of the story, but how the characters ended up.)
The world Phillip Pullman creates is one worthy of reading about. It’s interesting. The storyline he chooses for his book is a little weird and weak at some points but he manages to pull it off. The weakness and weirdness, in my opinion, stem from the misplaced focus of the story (this is similar to what I perceive as the problem with the Lord of the Rings, too.) Pullman falls in love with his main characters and their destiny and he just leaves the story to live in the background, except were he forces it to change its course to suit them. Of course, it’s not as bad or childish as I make it sound. The books are way above average and may even be great for some tastes, just not so for mine.

I was not en route this Norooz, contrary to the past years, and it was much better to be at home at the time of the turning of the year.
It was much better to be asleep in my own bed than to be asleep on a plane or train.

Arthur C. Clarke has died today, at age of 90. He is (I guess I have to say was) one of my favorite authors.

No one (with exception of Isaac Asimov) has introduced me to more novel ideas than him. I thank him for his books and ideas and the doors he opened for me and many more. May his memory and his works live on.

I just realized a very weird thing. My very top favorite writers have all died in my life time! Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Robert Jordan and now Arthur Clarke. I guess I should drop Discworld series before I get seriously entangled in the series and start loving it! And Malazan Book of the Fallen too!

I hate everything that I don’t choose for myself. I hate life, because of that. But even more that life itself, I’m right now pissed off about the holidays. What’s so great about an arbitrary placement of this planet we are living on, merely as a result of some cosmic accident? I mean, what’s wrong with all these oblivious people going around with all this phony merriment? And how dare they expect me to be happy too, just because “it’s a time for happiness”? What in the frakking fires of fifteen hells I’m supposed to be happy about?

Why can’t people just leave me alone?

The book, “A Prayer for the Dying” by Jack Higgins, was extremely fascinating for me. I read it only once or twice, and more than 10 years ago in high school, but it has made its impression on me.
It’s about a former IRA bomb-maker, Martin Fallon, who has left his ideologic work because he has blown up a schoolbus full of children by mistake.
While the story is attractive in its own right, what makes the book memorable even to this day is Martin Fallon himself. He is more than once described as dead inside. I think I know the feeling. Much deeper and stronger than despair, a special kind of apathy that keeps one from caring. He truely did not care whether he lived or died.
If you are into short paperbacks for fun and sometimes more, I strongly suggest this. And don’t forget to lend it to me so I can read it once more.

This is not about Steve Jobs. It’s about my jobs. You see, I’ve been working as a software developer for about 9 years. I got my first job in the spring of 1999. I’ve worked as a freelance programmer, as a team lead, as a senior programmer, as a senior programmer and the CEO of the company, as a consultant, as a teacher, and as an overseeing project manager.
My teaching jobs have been, I’m sorry to say, boring. The reason for that is probably either the subjects I’ve taught (Assembly language, C++ programming, algorithmic problem solving, computer graphics, digital logic circuits, etc.) or me or the students. I’m partial to option four: me and the students. I’ve yet to have a class where the students are really passionate about the subject, and know or care more than I do. There has been exceptions, but they have been small (in numbers and in duration.) I feel like I have been teaching the wrong stuff to the wrong people. That’s why I slowly lost interest and I haven’t had a class that could be called that in about two years now.
The only non-programming-related job I’ve ever had - it was running a company - I totally FUBARed (hint: the UBAR stands for “Up Beyond All Repair”. You figure out the F!)
My programming jobs haven’t been perfect either (from the execution standpoint) but I think the problems in them weren’t because of my lack of technical skills. In fact, I have never worked with an individual who was clearly better than I in most of the programming-related areas.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not praise of my mighty skills. And I have worked with at least half a dozen brilliant people who were at least as good as I was, and probably better, but not so much so that I could know that they would always come up with a better answer than I. Again to clarify, I’m not talking about skills in project management, software design, vision, etc. I’m talking about sitting behind a computer and producing elegant, high-quality code that gets some job done. I have had several coworkers that were my peers, and I could go to them and we would sort a problem out together, but never someone who I could look up to as a mentor, and would answer my questions with insights and logic that would have been beyond me. Someone who would give me an answer, and I would mull over it for a few minutes/hours/days and then suddenly go “Aha!” and find out something entirely new. I need a programmer equivalent of Yoda!
I had a teacher like that once. Her name was Ms. Karimpour, a middle-aged woman who didn’t even have a PhD, and I attended her Advanced Programming (C++) classes back in 2001. Most of the programming I know, she taught me indirectly. The amount of C++ she taught me was not huge, but the amount of right attitude I picked up in her class was enormous.
To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever been a good mentor to anyone either. I have worked with many people who’ve been in the beginning of the road and had potential, but I either bored them away by all the stupid detail I just had to try and cram in their heads, or they thought too much of themselves to accept a “padawan” role, or they simply didn’t thought programming was so exciting a trade to be worth investing almost a lifetime in.
As I said, I have worked with some great people. It might be great to work with a real Jedi master, but working with someone around your own level or a little better, with mostly overlapping knowledge but different thinking patterns have it’s great advantages too. Programming-wise, I’ve only worked with one or two such individuals, the prominent one currently studying to get his PhD, therefore, there’s absolutely no hope of him ever writing any more real code, ever. (I’m really disappointed, Ehsan! I know that’s out of your fear! And I know that you never read my blog so I can write whatever I want about you!)
But of course, not all one needs to learn is programming. I used to believe it was enough until I worked with Farzam for a few months.
I guess I’m a very bad coworker myself. I assume I’m always right, and everyone is either wrong or only correct by accident. I’m a perfectionist, who seldom does the perfect thing himself. As a result, I nag a lot. I have no problem with sharing what I know, absolutely no problem, but if the receiving person doesn’t learn what she should, I won’t waste my time anymore by explaining everything the next time. Maybe I give up on people too easily, I don’t know.

I wrote all that blabber to say that I’ve never worked as a sysadmin, or resident IT support person. I think I’m good at it. I know enough about computers and networks (as a user and programmer) to be able to extrapolate more knowledge or at least know where to look for more. And I think I’m good at handling PEBCAK-type problems (the user syndrome!) I think it’s a less stressful job that can even be fun, and leave me enough time to actually have a life (note that by having a life, I mean spending more time with computers and do my own projects!) When it comes to devising rules and regulations, I’m even better than your average, tea-mongering, job-skipping bureaucrat! I can write a booklet with 6 chapters, 100 items and 60 footnotes about how to organize your Windows desktop!
You see, one thing I’m good at is short jobs (a few hours max.) That’s why I usually botch up software projects, because they are long, even open-ended. That’s why I’m not good at long-term research and academic work. I think a sysadmin’s job is composed of a series of small tasks: install this, upgrade that, evaluate this other one, audit and regulate the bandwidth use, write some scripts to automate these jobs, etc. etc. Of course, if you are a sysadmin in a large corporation with a few hundred or more employees, then this won’t be the case, but I’m not talking about that.
One big hazard of this line of work is the “pointy haired boss”. As a programmer, you mostly deal with other programmers, and if you are lucky, few others. A sysadmin works directly with mostly bad users (stupid, apathetic or ignorant) and pointy haired bosses. I told you I can handle users, and I think I can handle idiot bosses too. I think I can understand what drives both of them (after all, the pointy haired boss is only a stupid user who gets to tell you what to do.) This doesn’t mean I suffer them or tolerate them, but I can at least sympathize with them while I tell them sharply that they are idiots!

Another dream job of mine is as the resident programming guru. One that doesn’t participate in any project and only helps out with specific programming problems; the low-level “how”s, and never “what”s or “when”s. This really is a dream, since I’ve never heard of such a job in the business.

So, if you looking for someone for either of the above jobs to offer, drop me a line!

The night before last I was crashing at some friends’ dorm room and someone suggested playing Counter-Strike (wasn’t me! I don’t like that game and I’m not even good at it.) We all had laptops and wireless networking was at hand (so may call it a WLAN party!) and we got started.
Just a quick note. Don’t do games on wireless LANs, or not with so many people, or at least buy a good switch/access point (we hadn’t.) The lag was awful. The game was fun though.
There were 9 of us and we shot and killed each other till 5-6 in the morning, and if it wasn’t for the easiness of those terrorists (eat that!) it would have lasted longer. It was the highest number of people I’ve played anything on a LAN against, and I can conclude two things:

• Counter-Strike is easy and does not deserve its reputation and status. I had played CS for a total of less than an hour before the other night, and yet I was the numerically best player of my team (we were CT, so you do understand that it was harder to win, and there were two players with higher kill counts on the terrorists team.) Quake III Arena still rules!
• I’m going to try and organize such get-togethers more often if I can. There’s no hope for it here in Mashhad. We would be constrained about place and people and equipment. I may have to move to Tehran after all!

I just updated my list and uploaded the list here. I also added a permanent link in the “links” section on the side of this page.

I spent something like 12-13 hours and Mike is now up and running again. I installed a better and more slick Windows XP on another hard disk (newer, but not still brand new, because Mike won’t boot large disks,) and transported my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles over from the old BugXP, oops, I mean WinXP. I have a basic habitat up now, including all the drivers, some of which where rather hard to find, but still my codecs, my key ring and my development tools and environment (besides VC9.0) are not satisfactory.

But I’m relieved that this old dragon is still living on. Queue “Some kind of monster”! By the way, Mike says thanks to all of you who asked and where worried about his health! And Rincewind (my laptop) is trying to pretend that he’s not jealous!

OMG!
OMFG!
(Note the plural!)
Read this news article on Slashdot. Wow! I don’t care if it works, or is it even practical. The idea of having an input device such as this is sooo appealing to me…
A while back I read about an Australian who had put an RFID tag into his arm, and it acted as his identity for everything in his home, where he obviously had rigged everything to be controlled via software. I wish I was tech savvy enough to do such a thing. But over here, it’s all just Make-It-Yourself, not Connect-It-Yourself.

I wish I could put an 802.11 interface in my brain.