noam's blog.a.lish

Ran into an interesting article which I thought I should share... The premise of this article is a programming language is as popular as the length of it's authors facial hair... crazy right? (excuse the pretty bad english)

One sight at [Bjorn] Stroustrup's face is enough to understand, that C++ much more successful then other languages.

Not the law is clear? There is a beard - there is a success. There is no beard - you are guilty.

Eifell, Scheme, Cecil, Haskell, Erlang - great languages, but no one except profs are working with them

The "catch" is in moustaches. Perl is the one more language widespread almost as the BASIC and having almost same bad glory. It has written Larri Wall. Look what moustaches he has.

The authors of others script languages have no moustaches. Ruby and the Python is better, than Perl, but meet where less often than Perl. There is, however, a hope for Van Rossum, suddenly will grow a beard. It is not necessary to count on Mr. Matsumoto - at Japanese the beard grows badly.

Could it be that the actual connection is between personal hygiene and nerdiness?

p.s. The follow up article can be found here

It's been way too long since I last saw a new episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, actually now that I think of it it's been way too long since I've seen a new episode of anything... Well to fill that void, the Larry David void that is, I had to turn to other sources.

p.s. When is the new season starting anyway?

If you enjoyed TripAdvisorts IQ Game you're bound to enjoy this game... sure it's not as slick as the Trip Advisor one but it's actually quite fun. My best score is 88%... Can you beat me?

p.s. I just noticed some links breaking on my site... any ideas what the hell is up?

Saw this on Facebook and was just amazed. I'm not sure how authentic the entire thing is but it's hot... very very hot.

Capoeira + Soccer @Rio = HOT.

Ever had a boss or peer who types with two fingers? Has that ever bothered you a little? Do you have a boss or peer that thinks they're all that because they can type a gazilion words per second? Do you think you're faster than them?

Now you can solve all of your problems with one site. Give your annoying single-finger-typer the gift of speed typing, prove to your peers that you are the fastest typer west of the Nile. Take the challenge, I did.

Looks like type racer is based on open social which means you're going to see this on almost every social network you can imagine (think Facebook, orkut, igoogle, etc.)

I'm loving this game, and it's a healthy workout. The should have a "calories burnt" next to the wpm counter... that would be awesome.

OK, so this isn't Silverlight's Zoom in feature and this isn't PhotoSynth (if you don't know what PhotoSynth is you have to click here) but PicLens is pretty cool.

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again.

I was basically told to download the software and search for Jessica Alba on Google... of course I kicked it up a notch and searched for Bar Refaeli... this really deserves a wow....

You may have noticed the 4 flags next to the date on the top right. Go ahead, click on one of them I'll wait.

Google just released this new AJAX API for translating and detecting languages on the fly, something I like to call GLoco-lize. I think this is a great tool and I think Google really did it up. They are currently in version 1 of the API and I'm sure that with the communities help most issues will be resolved, and new innovative features should be present by version 2.

So I thought this was a really cool feature to add to the blog, and decided to implement it. Overall I think it took me about 2 hours to plug everything in, style and tailor it to blog.a.lish standards. It's relatively easy to use but I did run into a couple of bugs and a few expected limitations while implementing this:

• There is a limit on the size of request you can make. I didn't find anything on GLoco-lize so I'm currently limiting the translated string to 1000 characters so you really only get a partial translation.
• The support for Portuguese, which is kind of important to me, does not work! Even though they did say it works and the sample page includes it, it didn't work for me.
• HTML support is not great, URL's are sometimes translated... ughh. So for now, I'm stripping out the HTML tags.

So I now officially support Spanish (es), French (fr), Italian (it), and German (de) but only for Jacobooie. Should I add Japanese support just for the hell of it? It's only a flag away.

Just thought this was funny and disturbing. GTalk is saying I have 4 emails and I would really like to read them... then again Gmail is in beta right? Nice addition to my growing collection of major services that take short breaks every once in a while... I wonder if the Gmail team is scrambling as much as my team and I were this week due to a damn jvm heap issue. Gotta love the Java.

It's still down... I have it down for over 10 minutes now... awkward.

Ever wonder what the most common programming language is? Obviously this has changed quite a bit over the years, and that's easy to prove: new languages emerged, old languages proven inadequate etc. I was wondering what the most common languages are and hoped there was some resource online that could help me with this question. I found two interesting resources, both of which I'm not sure are completely accurate. Nevertheless I found that Java and C are almost always identified as the most common programming languages which surprised me a little.

Sources:
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
http://www.dedasys.com/articles/language_popularity.html

Sergey and Larry were definitely on to something when they realized that the world needed a fast way to search for... well stuff... online (and by on to something I mean 18.7 Billion dollars worth of OTS). Microsoft, of course, realized the monetization potential when they launched Live Search and so did Yahoo!. As with any successful market there always seems to be room for improvement. My first glimpse into a suped up search tool was Snap. I met the Snap guys at a TechCrunch event back in early 2007 and I liked what they came up with. After that (I believe) we started to see the Ask.com commercials online, combining quick preview, keyboard support and other cool stuff. The problem I have with Ask.com is that their service is slow, the pages are slow... do NOT make me wait!!!

I'm sure there are millions of other players in the search-o-sphere, but none that seem as nice as Search Me. The new Visual Search paradigm seems like the way to go now that people have better internet connections. I have to admit I have my doubts about how fast and effective this tool will actually work (they're in private beta right now, still waiting for an email from them...) but I'm excited to see smaller players get up in MSFT, Yahoo!, and Goog's faces and basically force them to innovate this field.

I realize this is a press release, but the voice over is quite annoying... IMHO.

This designer guy, Aaron Koblin, asked people (workers) to draw sheep a sheep facing left on Amazon Mechanical Turk, he paid the $0.02 per sheep... this is what he got.

baaah baaah

Imagine what he could get for $0.03... it blows my mind.

Mr. David Heinemeier Hansson, aka "the douche" voiced his opinion about "programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice" on his blog way back in March of 2005. He used that post to point out that:

[He] would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals [his company]. If you don't care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.

So if you haven't switched already, stop procrastinating. Get it over with. If you have any desire working for the rising rank of companies building their business on open source technologies, you don't want to carry a liability like that around on you resume. Being labeled a 2005 Switcher is bad enough.

Jeff Atwood, at one of my favorite blogs, Coding Horror pointed out what a douche Heinemeier was for writing what he thought was a reasonably valid point in a very distasteful way. He also points out words from a 2007 technology prediction piece by "the douche" where he is quoted saying:

Here's what I don't understand about statements like this. They have exactly the opposite effect that the speaker probably intends. There are two possible reactions:

1. Wow, David's right. I made the wrong choice in my career. It's high time I looked into OS X and Rails programming. They sound great!
2. F****************k you.

Guess which reaction is more common? Actually, there's no need to guess, as I can guarantee every Windows programmer reading this is thinking #2 right now. As an evangelist looking to increase adoption of your platform, this is a remarkably poor strategy. When has abusing people into agreeing with you ever worked?

Of course, as David has said many, many times, he doesn't care whether we agree with him or not. Well, not in so many words, but you get the idea:

I actually admire this sentiment, as I've seen too many people get so wrapped up in what other people think of them that they can't bear to have an original opinion about anything. But if you accept the premise that this kind of statement won't change anyone's mind, and is ultimately ineffective-- even counterproductive-- what are we left with? What purpose does the statement "stigma of being a Windows developer" serve? I can only think of one: David gets off on putting other people down.

And that makes him kind of a douchebag.

Which also means when you're using Rails and OS X, you're using the platform of choice for douchebags.

Well I'm obviously a .NET developer, and while I am all for open source software, did it occur to "the douche" that Windowz is still the leading platform out there? Did it occur to him the MOST of his users are probably using his software on a windows box? The point Jeff makes about "there's nothing more satisfying than kicking someone's ass with the worst character in the game." is a little harsh (if my understanding of his comparison of Earthquake in Samurai Showdown II to Windows...) but I kind of understand what he's saying... fuck the tools you have, if you're a great developer you can write C# in any language.