“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity” Robert A. Heinlein

You are smart. You know it. People around do notice. You must be doing great, but somehow you are not. You are stuck and not sure what to do. It’s probably time to be stupid. Let me bring up some well-known examples first.

1. Sergey and Larry launched yet another search engine in 1996. With no business model and the market apparently dominated by behemoths like Yahoo.
2. Andy wrote a check for $100,000 to the guys he barely knew, before they even had a company.
3. Stanford drop off Steve persuaded his friend Woz to build personal computers in a garage. Woz later said that “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, (b) not having done it before ever.”

At the time, when it was happening, all that would be considered very stupid by most of us.

As heretic as it sounds you can’t avoid being stupid if you want to succeed. The Heinlein’s quote above might be deeper than most people think. I’m going to use a little computer science example to explain how it works.
Continue reading…

It’s been a long time since I wrote here something. As things keep on being crazy (and exciting) with Loudtalks, it’s not going to change any time soon. Yet, I found some old text on my HDD, which I wrote while the life was easy but never posted them since they were not quite complete yet. I’ll publish them now (as is) and will finally cross these long overdue items in my never ending to do.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

In a kindergarten I wanted to be Fantomas but nobody asked. Then – an astronaut. Then – an archeologist (yup, if you meet Harrison Ford please tell him). Then – a geologist. Then… strangely I don’t remember what was my target in the high school.

Astronaut, archeologist, geologist – this is what I was telling adults when asked. I never told them the truth because they wouldn’t understand. What I wanted to be the most was a magician. I wanted that magic wand and the power to make wonderful and impossible things. At different times people, who wanted to be magicians, selected different professions. In XVIII century’s magic was alchemy, in XIX – chemistry and in XX – physics. Software and computer science are the magic of our time.

I’m a happy man because I’m living the dream. You are probably too. But here is the question. Is software the last magic ever? I guess it isn’t. Then, what’s the next?

What do you think?

P.S.

Current magic typically fails to deliver, what was expected, however the next magic delivers something valuable and quite unexpected instead.

Alchemy failed to turn lead into gold, but gave us Newton laws.

Physics failed in nuclear fusion power, flying cars, teleportation and space travel. We’ve got the internet, mobile phones, pocket-sized computers and Moore’s law instead.

Computer science will probably fail in thinking computers (aka Artificial Intelligence), natural language processing and transparent real-time machine translation (Babel fish).

What will be the next magic? What surprises will it bring to us?

A form for a project executive summary within Russian state seed funding program application website (START 2009) states:

“You don’t have to prove anything in the executive summary”

That’s nonsense. If you don’t prove anything, why bother writing?

Here are my rules for the new product development:

1. Start from something interesting and intriguing. Ignore usual expectations at that point
2. Develop your vision fully before starting to think about standard features
3. Keep it fun, keep on trying new things. Otherwise they’ll stand up and go
4. At some point they’ll start crying about the missing standard features and asking to add them. Don’t!
5. Announce you will do that, but make yet another new and cool thing instead
6. That will make them really want it
7. Go ahead and add the standard stuff… wow

Apple executed it perfectly with the iPhone (and its SDK), why don’t you try it at home?

Happy Valentine’s day everyone!

Last December I wrote a post where shared some of mysterious New Year greetings cards I received. One of them was from FortRoss (which I lamely mixed up with RUSSOFT). But that’s not the point. Here is what I wrote then:

This one is from FortRoss — the Russian Software Developers association. The footprints leading through the FortRoss logo to the frozen forest and the title “See you next year”… Hmm, what did they mean? I assume this is the allegory to the well known Ivan Susanin story.

Now the fun part. We have been looking for a friendly company to share our gigantic office space for some time and finally found the one. This week FortRoss is moving in to our offices.

Welcome aboard guys, now I know what you meant in that e-card!

Did you know that there is an unrecoverable natural resource, which is more valuable than oil and gas? There is a very limited supply of it, and I can safely say that it will run out in no longer than 90 years or, if we are not lucky, maybe even tomorrow. It’s your time. Yes, I mean your. Spend wisely.

Back from RUSSOFT Forum 2007, which happened this week in St. Petersburg. Some quick observations:

• Most people agree that services business sucks yet all but few are doing exactly this
• The reason for this controversy (in my opinion) is that product business is way riskier and there is no venture and seed capital culture in Russia to back up that risk
• Product Engineering services (ie build the products for others) are accepted as a nice compromise — you do the product and don’t risk that much
• The biggest Russian software companies have around 2500 employees, while Indian ones — 100000
• The quality of marketing of even the biggest Russian software companies leaves much to be desired — brochures are lousy (even though paper quality is good) and most powerpoints are to be nominated for “The Worse PowerPoint” contest
• The following things are proudly made in Russia: voice codecs or/and audio processing code in Apple iPod, Adobe Flash player and ~100M mobile phones (by SpiritDSP); BlueCat Linux (by Auriga); TrustedOpinion.com (by Reksoft); comapping.com (by Lanit-Tepkom); HotWire (by Luxoft)
• All people in the forum could be divided into two categories: those, who think how to compete with India, and those, who think how NOT to compete with India. I belong to the second group (if you are a software developer from India I would be interested to hear your opinion regarding Russia)

I had an extremely realistic dream last night. It was so life-alike that I thought it was real. Then something strange started happening, some things went different than they should and I started questioning myself — “if this reality or a dream?”. I couldn’t wake up so it was an important question. I decided I should perform a series of reality tests… and all of them passed. It was the reality.

“Wow”, I thought, “I could write a nice movie plot based on this experience”. The very same moment I awoke.

If you want to challenge your dream, try to monetize it.

Today I stumbled upon Meebo again and a tiny text at the bottom saying “Passwords encrypted with 1024-bit RSA keys” caught my attention. ‘Interesting’, I thought, ‘what kind of RSA-code they are using’, and clicked on Firebug icon in Firefox status panel to check out their JavaScript source. Here is what I found:

I’m not sure if it works but I’m impressed. Out to publish some job ads in this site’s source code.

(Update: It seems that it does work to a certain degree.)

You know that Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, however with all that intelligence, it collects every day, every minute, every click, it could eventually turn very tempting for it to sample the power of the dark side. Let’s imagine just for a moment, what Google could do if it were evil.

Let’s start from what it has.

1. It knows what you search, which results click and keeps complete history of your searches (if you use Google search)
2. It knows what you send and receive in your emails, knows who your connections are (if you use Gmail as your personal or corporate email)
3. It knows what RSS feeds you are subscribed for, what you actually read and when (if you use Google Reader or the publisher uses Feedburner)
4. It knows what websites you browse beyond the search (and every page you visit), what you buy and how much spend (if the site uses Google Analytics and / or Google Checkout)
5. It knows, where you live (if you ever used Google Maps to take a look on your house from satellite’s point) and where you work
6. It builds huge datacenters and employs the best scientists and engineers specializing in information processing

Continue reading…

If I needed to illustrate the word “weird” I would use the following scene I saw today (sorry, I have no pictures so you have to use your imagination).

11 PM, it’s dark and rainy. A bus stop. Few late workers waiting for the bus. A street cleansing machine circling round and around the bus stop again and again washing the street and occasional pedestrians’ shoes to their great surprise.

Every time I read it — it inspires me. Every single post hits it right to the point. If I would be forced to unsubscribe from all feeds but one, I’d stay with this one without doubts.

Meet Seth Godin — my favorite blog author of all times. I’m not sure how he makes it, but I wish I’m doing like that in blogging (and marketing) some day.

For now the best I can do is to recommend you to go to his site and subscribe to the rss-feed — you won’t regret — I promise.

How to make $5,000 in one day without making anything? Ask Tom Barba, he seems to figure it out.

Today I received the following email from him:

Hello,

We acquired the domain MetaLink.com recently. It is now available at the price of USD 6500.

If you are interested in it, pls let us know before 3:00 pm, Tuesday, Apr 17, 2007 EST. After that, this domain may not be available anymore.

About the transition:
The transition of domain and payment can be finished through a trusted third-party escrow service like sedo.com, afternic.com, etc, so you don’t have to worry about the trust problems. If you don’t get the domain, we will not get paid.

NOTE: If the name is bought by other company or person, it may never be available again.

Best regards,

Tom Barba

What’s wrong with it? Isn’t it a fair business offer? It would be if not one small detail. Tom lies and they didn’t acquire the domain. It’s still for sale at snapnames.com and the price is $1,250.

Today I used “cool” as del.icio.us tag for the first time.

I never thought I would use it at all but when I saw this personal website of Bret Victor it came up organically and indisputable. Other del.icio.us users seems to agree. If you haven’t seen it yet — sit down and take a look.

I got to the site to check who is the author of Magic Ink — an amazing paper on UI-design, focused on reducing interactivity rather than building on it. I haven’t read it yet (I don’t think anyone did as seen from this discussion at Digg, where I found the link) but even brief scanning proves that the concepts Bret presents deserve very careful attention. I downloaded the PDF and will be reading it slowly as time permits.

Yes, it’s true and here is the link http://www.crackcity.ru/.

Check it out and you’ll like what you see. The site is built by PR-agency FMC Group and intended to convince users buying legal Adobe software. The idea is interesting and the site looks authentic although there are couple of problems with it:

• This won’t work because you can’t get blood from a stone. I can’t imagine a user, who is impressed with this trick to the degree that will make him go shopping for Adobe Creative Suite instead of looking for cracks further
• The site actually helps finding cracks for Adobe software. To make it more authentic FMC people used real filenames of crack releases. Everybody who ever tried searching files with Google knows that finding the file by its exact name is much easier than using generic queries
• The anti-piracy site violates 3rd party copyright itself. The quadratic easing in equations code used in JavaScript on the page is copied in violation of the license from Robert Penner’s ActionScript code.

  Continue reading…

Ever wondered, what these free screensavers are all about?

Here is a good example of a job posted on Elance, which clarifies things a bit. To put it short the person there orders screensaver bundled with some sort of malware. Right now there are two people already willing to implement it…

Project Description
I need 2 softwares bundled together.

First software is a screensaver. (screensaver.exe) I will provide you with 20 pictures of THE PEAKS and I need a simple slideshow screensaver with these pictures. No need for settings or any special functions. I will need an installation wizard to install the software. Software will install itself in (c:/program files/thepeaks/screensaver.exe) Nothing complicated. A very simple, very easy to use screensaver. You can even get open source code on the internet for simple screensaver, I really don’t mind. This screensaver should also be removable in the “add/remove” fonctions of windows.

When this screensaver is installed, it will install an other “silent” EXE software. (c:/program files/thepeaks/silent.exe)
Continue reading…

It’s tough, isn’t it?

Here is the same place on Google Maps.

This has been captured last spring — pretty fun and an excellent example to prove that teamwork matters. Be sure to have the sound on.

Here is the question — what the hell were we doing?

Think twice if you will want to do it some day

I’m using Wikipedia a lot for the same reason as everyone — it’s a great source of quality and up to date information on almost everything. I’ve been browsing streaming audio topics lately in the course of evaluating our new project and stumbled upon List of Internet stations article in the very top of which there was a Streaming media guides list. Surprisingly it didn’t include the best online radio guide I know — RadioTime, which provides the most comprehensive and accurate information on almost every single radio station available online. RadioTime happens to be our customer for 4+ years so I know the product very well. What surprised me even more is that two items in the list –- Icecast and Public Radio couldn’t be called streaming media guides at all.

My thought was, of course, — thanks wiki, I’ll fix this now. So I clicked “Edit this page” and added RadioTime to the list, linking it to presumably existing RadioTime article. That worked and the link appeared in the list, although it was red, which means no RadioTime article existed in Wiki at the moment. I clicked through it and was promised to create an account to be able to write an article on the topic. I felt I had to finish what I started, so I created an account and started learning how to use Wiki to create a nice looking company profile article. I learned some formatting tricks and style from AOL Radio page, had to read FAQ to know how to upload images and in a couple of hours has been able to put together a short article, which I thought would be a good start.

Continue reading…

It’s here and you should really take a look! Bravo, Apple, you did it again.

The device combines iPod, GSM-phone (so good they decided to go GSM way — means it’s going to work in Russia too) and “PocketMac” running on OS X! GUI is completely touch-screen based and looks just a level higher than anything you could see before in similar Windows Mobile devices. On the top of that you have all wireless interfaces you may need — EDGE/GPRS, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and WiFi b/g.

Do you want more? Probably not. However Apple do have more to make you thrill — iPhone has built-in accelerometer and automatically detects screen orientation, proximity sensor to turn off the screen when you use it as a phone and ambient light sensor to automatically adjust screen backlight.

Continue reading…

Somebody cut the phone line wire at my home so I’m going to be out of Internet at home for the next couple of weeks (New Year holidays are long here and there is no chance to get the line repaired soon). I feel pretty uncomfortable about it because I’ve been “always on” for the last few years. Let’s see if that will have any positive effects — I’m sure there must be some.

Finally here are some e-cards I received from colleagues / partners today:

This one is from FortRoss — the Russian Software Developers association. The footprints leading through the FortRoss logo to the frozen forest and the title “See you next year”… Hmm, what did they mean? I assume this is the allegory to the well known Ivan Susanin story.

This one is from Russian Association of Bodybuilding — looks just scary to me, especially Ded Moroz’s (the guy whom you in US call Santa) girlfriend.

Happy New Year, everybody! Thanks for reading this nonsense.

I like free software.

I like it because of its great value and you can take it and use it immediately whenever you need it. I like it also because I can afford it by definition and the choice is simple –- if it works I use it if doesn’t then I don’t –- no price tag should be taken into consideration. There is no risk in making this decision and if at any time later I discover the new software, which is better I can abandon the old one without any doubts. Of course often free software is pretty useless but it is not different with commercial software. Ultimately I wish all software to be free.

However there is one problem with it. Metalink is a software development company, which means somebody have to pay for the software we are developing or otherwise we would need free everything else (from food till houses) to survive. I think that it’s safe to assume that in any nearest future food and houses (especially houses) are not going to be free. With this pressing fact in mind I’m getting more liberal to non-free software and I do want to pay for some. I can tell exactly what kind of products I’m willing to pay for.
Continue reading…

A friend of mine sent me this file today asking what could it mean. I immediately recalled that I’ve found and removed exactly the same file from all my computers recently. Of course I know what is it — it’s the log file of MSXML4 update installation delivered over Windows Update service.

The real question is however why in the world Microsoft doesn’t care about leaving this garbage on hard drives of millions Windows users.

Paul Graham in his article provides an interesting insight of what makes Silicon Valley and how to produce another one. Since St Petersburg is often referred as Russian Silicon Valley I tried to run Paul’s checklist against our beautiful city, which resulted in writing this post.

Continue reading…

Unlike the previous post, this time I mean the real (construction) architecture.

I read today in New York Times’s web site that Gazpom is going to build some really interesting towers in St Petersburg:

The strange thing is that living in this city I never heard about it before. Moreover I always thought that the lack of skyscrapers in St Petersburg is caused by the fact that the city stands on “breathing” soil, which makes building high towers especially near the waterfront dangerous. I guess it was just a legend and the real reason is that nobody wanted to invest $2 billions in such project before.

“Stupid is as stupid does.” Forrest Gump’s Mom

Have you ever downloaded and installed a new driver for your electronic something just because it’s newer than the one you have? Upgraded something, which was working fine, for the hope that it will be working even better? It’s quite obvious that idea of improving something, which is working fine is not the greatest one but the digital lifestyle taught us that the newer the better and version 2.037 is a great step forward over 2.034 and can be ten times better than 1.010. We are still conservative when it comes to objects of physical world but when it comes to the software we get completely crazy in no time.

Today I decided to upgrade processor’s driver on my wife’s laptop. It’s not that she was not happy with how processor worked or that there was anything, which I knew that could be improved. I just read in some forum thread that AMD has just released the new driver for their processors (including AMD Turion64, which Irina’s laptop is running on). I went to the download page, discovered that there is some newer driver there and clicked “download”. Why? I don’t know… I did had a feeling that this wasn’t something I should do but it was suppressed by the curiosity of testing the newest driver for the processor (AMD made it, right? Then there must be some reason for them to do that – maybe it would make the processor work 2x faster?).

Here is what really happened. I tried to run the installer but it complained that another driver is already installed and I have to remove it first from Add / Remove programs. This is not something unusual so I did so, rebooted, when prompted and launched installer again. It seemed to be working initially this time but then stuck with “Looking for installed drivers” text and then… system turned off. In this moment I already knew that this update wasn’t going to be that good but it was already too late. “Ok, let’s try again” – I told to myself and pressed “power” button. In few seconds I saw the message

boot.ini not found – trying to boot from c:\windows

and in the next moment
Continue reading…

Metalink celebrates its 4th anniversary this week!

We had a good year and better yet to come. Thanks to everyone who has been with us through all that time — our customers, their users and our great team. Everyone who ever been a part of the team is invited to join us in the “Tolstiy fraer” pub near to the office (contact Marina for details and to reserve your beer).

Congratulations are welcomed; gifts are accepted but not required
Continue reading…

Well… I didn’t plan any follow up to the earlier post called Computers are useless (showing our new printed ads concept). However things turned out so that the story has to be continued. My laptop IBM ThinkPad T41p starred in these ads as “useless computer” among garbage and in the trash bin apparently didn’t like it. Next morning after we printed them it died (simply turned off the screen and never turned back) and become literally useless right when I needed it (I was in the hotel in Helsinki preparing for ICT Week Helsinki exhibition).

Is it coincidence? Probably yes. But it’s really strange one. Be aware, computers might have a soul too.

Are you one of those people who like to work on many problems at a time? I’m the one. Do you think that multi-tasking is good? I know it is. The topic of human multitasking has always been treated important but there was an apparent boom recently caused by Intel’s trick with their HT technology allowing the same processor to do more under certain conditions.

If you look around you’ll find many people who insist that it is bad or very bad or considered harmful (beautifully as always put together by Joel Spolsky). I do respect them, their writing is good and their arguments are reasonable. You shouldn’t be eating, watching TV and programming all simultaneously. You can’t be productive chatting on MSN, writing two emails and helping your colleague with that tricky piece of code. The outcome is trivial. There are no doubts that multitasking is bad.

However there are different types of multitasking.

Continue reading…