Month: September 2016

The September issue of AOPA Pilot has a story about a guy who bought a four-seat Piper Cherokee for $1,000 and is now flying it, having spent a total of $3,500 on the airplane and required maintenance. This certainly seems to prove that Americans can afford to fly… they just don’t want to (or at least they don’t want to fly like a 1950s GA pilot).

AOPA also describes a flying marriage proposal gone somewhat wrong. (If the happy couple ends up with some children and the wife ever decides that she would prefer to have sex with other people, the pilot will likely be sorry to have settled in Maryland rather than in neighboring Delaware or Pennsylvania.)

Meanwhile the August issue of Professional Pilot shows that Embraer is now #1 among business jet manufacturers in product support, ahead of traditional leader Gulfstream for the 2nd year in a row. Embraer also beats all of the turboprop manufacturers. Journalists threw rocks at the Brazilians for how they prepared to host the Olympics but it seems as though they can make airplanes…

Full post, including comments

Packing up for the trip to Reno and Las Vegas I decided to take advantage of the Verizon FiOS network here at home to make sure that all software was up to date, thus avoiding crawling downloads on America’s creaky public/hotel WiFi.

The Windows 10 laptop hadn’t been powered up for about four days so it needed two hours of operating system updates from MSFT. I returned to find a plain text notice on the screen: “An operating system wasn’t found. Try disconnecting any drives that don’t contain an operating system.” BIOS tools show that the hardware is all working perfectly. My files are still there on the hard drive as well.

The iPhone and iPad were updated to iOS 10. The iPad upgrade went smoothly. The iPhone hung indefinitely in an “updating iCloud settings” screen. Power cycling did not help. I was able to get the phone working by power cycling and skipping setting up iCloud.

The iPads that we use in the aircraft needed to get updated with the latest version of ForeFlight plus some data. The new iPad that we use to send text messages and email (“Hi, Mom”) via Iridium from the aircraft needed some app and data updates.

Software is supposed to drive our cars over Massachusetts roads with lane markings that were worn away back in the 1990s yet somehow it can’t update itself without hours of human intervention? (Maybe “days” in the case of the Windows 10 machine that is now a brick?)

[Speaking of Windows 10, the computer in question is about 4.5 years old. So HP isn’t responsible for it anymore, right? What about Microsoft? Do they have to fix this under a warranty if I bring it into one of their stores? Maybe the answer is “no” because I paid them for an OS 4.5 years ago. But maybe the answer is “yes” because they broke it yesterday with software that they distributed yesterday? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/ doesn’t say if there is a time limit on Windows 10 support starting on the date of purchase (does that even make sense with Windows 10 since it is free? How does it work in the Apple world? If an OS update from Apple breaks a 5-year-old computer can you bring it into the Apple Store and they will fix it for free?]

 

Full post, including comments

I’m packing up for my first trip to the Reno Air Races. I’ll be there Thursday afternoon through Sunday. Happy to meet up with readers! Just email me (philg@mit.edu).

Alternatives: tomorrow (Wednesday) evening after about 6 pm in Grand Junction, Colorado; Monday or Tuesday in Las Vegas (visiting the Papillon helicopter operation).

Full post, including comments

Peter the Great: His Life and World says that “What [William III] most disliked about the English was what he regarded as their naïve disregard of their own long-term interests and their selfish lack of concern about what happened to Europe.”

Perhaps things haven’t changed that much since 1700…

Full post, including comments

My Facebook friends aren’t too worried about Hillary’s health. Here’s a typical posting:

I would vote for Hillary Clinton for president if she was in a permanent coma that she could never wake up from. #ImWithHer

Aside from showing the death of the subjunctive, this posting presumably shows that the voter is presumably comfortable with the Democrat’s VP candidate actually doing the Presidential job. That led me to wonder if Americans in general wouldn’t be happier with both headline candidates withdrawing from the race. Would that automatically lead to the VP candidates facing off?

At that point both parties would have fairly generic and inoffensive candidates, no? The Democrats wouldn’t have the spouse of the former leader (go Argentina!) and a person who’d banked (some of it in a family-run foundation) $1 billion as a result of serving in politics . The Republicans wouldn’t have, well, Trump.

What do readers think? Could everyone relax a bit if the current Presidential candidates stepped down in favor of the VP candidates?

Full post, including comments

“What Programming’s Past Reveals About Today’s Gender-Pay Gap” (Atlantic) is kind of interesting because a journalist without apparently any programming experience writes about what programmers do and why one candidate might be preferred by an employer over another.

Here are some excerpts:

During the 1940s and 50s, it was primarily women, not men, who were developing code for the nation’s first computers, and the accompanying pay and prestige were both relatively low. But as the century progressed and the field of computing became male-heavy, compensation and esteem both rose precipitously—despite the fact that the substance of the job remained similar.

How did programming transform from a feminine field into an occupation synonymous with young men wearing hoodies who collect generous salaries for hacking and disrupting things? The story behind the fluctuations in programmers’ salaries and cultural status—as well as those of other professions whose gender composition has shifted over the years—sheds light on how and why women’s work is, across the economy, considered to be less valuable than men’s work. It also provides a rebuttal to the common argument that the gender-pay gap exists because women tend to choose less demanding jobs that pay less.

Aptitude tests and personality profiles, which were the primary mechanisms used to screen and rank job candidates in programming in the 1950s and 60s, helped accelerate the profession’s shift from female to male. … The type of math questions on these multiple-choice exams—requiring little nuance or context-specific problem solving—were often testing skills that men were more likely than women to have learned in school at a time when girls were more likely to be steered away from STEM subjects.

Coders: What do you think of this article? Can it be the case that IBM’s hiring practices in the 1950s are determining the composition of the modern programming workforce?

[Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t point out that a woman in a lot of U.S. states (including here in Massachusetts) who wanted to have the spending power of a programmer could simply have sex with three programmers and then collect child support plus, if she did choose to work at a job more enjoyable (to her) than programming, park the children in daycare at the defendants’ expense (on top of the child support cashflow).]

Full post, including comments

What was London like circa 1700? Peter the Great: His Life and World has the answers.

The London that Peter visited and explored on foot was rich, vital, dirty and dangerous. The narrow streets were piled with garbage and filth which could be dropped freely from any overhanging window. Even the main avenues were dark and airless because greedy builders, anxious to gain more space, had projected upper stories out over the street. Through these Stygian alleys, crowds of Londoners jostled and pushed one another. Traffic congestion was monumental. Lines of carriages and hackney cabs cut deep ruts into the streets, so that passengers inside were tossed about, arriving breathless, nauseated and sometimes bruised.

London was a violent city with coarse, cruel pleasures which quickly crushed the unprotected innocent. For women, the age of consent was twelve (it remained twelve in England until 1885).

For intelligent men, life in London centered on hundreds of coffee houses where the conversation could center on anything under the sun. Gradually, the different houses began to specialize in talk about politics, religion, literature, scientific ideas, business, shipping or agriculture. Choosing the house by the talk he wished to hear, a visitor could step in, sit by the fire, sip coffee and listen to every shade of opinion expressed in brilliant, learned and passionate terms. Good conversationalists could sharpen their wits, writers could share their dilemmas, politicians could arrange compromises, the lonely could find simple warmth. In Lloyd’s coffee house, marine insurance had its beginnings. At Will’s, Addison was to have his chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer.

Don’t like your tenants? It could be worse…

But it was not until the Russians had left at the end of their three-month stay and Evelyn came to see his once-beautiful home that the full extent of the damage became apparent. Appalled, Evelyn hurried off to the Royal Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Royal Gardener, Mr. London, to ask them to estimate the cost of the repairs. They found floors and carpets so stained and smeared with ink and grease that new floors had to be installed. Tiles had been pulled from the Dutch stoves and brass door locks pried open. The paintwork was battered and filthy. Windows were broken, and more than fifty chairs—every one in the house—had simply disappeared, probably into the stoves. Featherbeds, sheets and canopies were ripped and torn as if by wild animals. Twenty pictures and portraits were torn, probably used for target practice. Outside, the garden was ruined. The lawn was trampled into mud and dust, “as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on it.” The magnificent holly hedge, 400 feet long, 9 feet high and 5 feet thick, had been flattened by wheelbarrows rammed through it. The bowling green, the gravel paths, the bushes and trees, all were ravaged. Neighbors reported that the Russians had found three wheelbarrows, unknown in Russia, and had developed a game with one man, sometimes the Tsar, inside the wheelbarrow and another racing him into the hedges. Wren and his companions noted all this and made a recommendation which resulted in a recompense to Evelyn of 350 pounds and ninepence, an enormous sum for that day.

Peter loved his time there:

Although he never returned to England, Peter had enjoyed his taste of English life. He found there much that he liked: informality, a practical, efficient monarch and government, good drinking and good talk about ships, gunnery and fireworks. Although he was not intimate with William, the King had opened every door, he had given Peter access to his shipyards, mint and gun foundries, he had displayed his fleet, he had allowed the Russians to talk with everyone and make notes. Peter was grateful and carried away the highest respect not only for English ship design and workmanship, but for the island as a whole. In Russia, he once said to Perry that “if he had not come to England he had certainly been a bungler.” Further, continued Perry, “His Majesty has often declared to his lords, when he has been a little merry, that he thinks it a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a tsar in Russia.” “The English island,” Peter said, “is the best and most beautiful in the world.”

Full post, including comments

Today is typically a day for Americans to reflect on stuff that was brought down. Recommended reading for today: “A Monument to Outlast Humanity: In the Nevada desert, the pioneering artist Michael Heizer completes his colossal life’s work.” (New Yorker)

[Separately, the location of this art installation might be a good destination for drone and/or helicopter pilots. Based on the description in the article, who can find it on Google Maps and post a link in the comments?]

Full post, including comments

Sony knocks it out of the DxOMark park with their 85/1.4 lens, which has an only slightly crazy price of $1,800: review with a score of 49. Worth reading just to see what Sony can do with their own designers (presumably) and under their own brand name rather than in partnership with Zeiss. Only about 1% as exciting as the iPhone 7, presumably, despite the vastly superior image quality. I guess that is fair considering that you’re not going to get this lens into your pocket.

Full post, including comments

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains some reading list advice for engineers:

On the last hour of the last day, McEachen [superstar programmer], saint that he was, went to Murthy’s [Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, Martinez’s previous employer] office to say good-bye. He had invested over four years of his life in the company, watching it grow from a small shared space to the expansive floor of a high-end office tower. I waited impatiently by the emergency exit staircase, to avoid running into any other employees. After ten minutes or so, he emerged, looking astonished, or maybe shell-shocked. “He barely even looked up from the screen.” His voice cracked as he said it. He looked at me imploringly. For a moment I thought he might actually cry. “He didn’t say anything, and didn’t shake my hand.”

Matt McEachen, Adchemy’s best, most productive engineer, until the day he left the author of the biggest chunk of Adchemy’s codebase, was treated worse than a contract janitor on the way out. I marveled at a world in which well-meaning, industrious, but naive engineers are routinely manipulated by the glib entrepreneurs who seduce them into joining their startups, then relinquish them when they are no longer useful. Every Jobs has his Wozniak. I couldn’t exactly claim I wasn’t, to some degree, doing the same to him right then. He was merely trading Murthy for me.

Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.

Following a moderately successful seed phase in a Y Combinator startup, Martinez has to choose between Facebook and Twitter for his next act:

In December 2010, Zynga launched a FarmVille clone called CityVille. That game, a moronic rip-off of the far cleverer game The Sims, had accumulated one hundred million users in a month. One hundred million users! If humanity had waited until 2010 to invent masturbation, it would not have caught on as fast as CityVille. That’s how fast Facebook could make something happen.

Here’s another data point for you: As part of our push to woo Facebook, I had been getting Google Alerts on the company for months. One in particular had caught my attention. In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying. A mother destroyed with her own hands what she’d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game. Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world. Facebook was legalized crack, and at Internet scale. Such a company could certainly figure out a way to sell shoes. Twitter was cute and all, but it didn’t have a casualty rate yet, …

I recall very little from the interviews, except a comment from one of the DabbleDB engineers. After getting through the stress questions, I asked him, “So what do you like most about Twitter?” By this point, we’d built a decent rapport, so with a nod and a wink, he said, “Well, you know, in companies like Facebook and Google, they serve you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here at Twitter, they only serve you breakfast and lunch.” I cringed inwardly. So the big selling point was that nobody worked late into the night, so we could have that chimerical work-life balance?* I smiled to keep the warm vibe going. But that comment more than anything else sealed my decision. I was not going to blow the biggest career wad of my life on a company that hesitated to work past six p.m. daily.

I submit [Mark Zuckerberg] was an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well. The Jefferson, the Napoleon, the Alexander . . . the Jim Jones, the L. Ron Hubbard, the Joseph Smith. Keeper of a messianic vision that, though mercurial and stinting on specifics, presents an overwhelming and all-consuming picture of a new and different world. Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader. By imprinting this vision on his disciples, he founded the church of a new religion. … Then there was the culture he created. Many cool Valley companies have engineering-first cultures, but Facebook took it to a different level. … That was the uniquely piratical attitude: if you could get shit done and quickly, nobody cared much about credentials or traditional legalistic morality. The hacker ethos prevailed above all. This culture is what kept twenty-three-year-old kids who were making half a million a year, in a city where there was lots of fun on offer if you had the cash, tethered to a corporate campus for fourteen-hour days. They ate three meals a day there, sometimes slept there, and did nothing but write code, review code, or comment on new features in internal Facebook groups. On the day of the IPO—Facebook’s victory rally—the Ads area was full of busily working engineers at eight p.m. on a Friday. All were at that point worth real money—even fuck-you money for some—and all were writing code on the very day their paper turned to hard cash.

A concrete example of the zealotry?

In June 2011, Google launched an obvious Facebook copy called Google Plus. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets placing nukes on Cuba in 1961. This was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical. … the cafés would be open over the weekends, and the proposal was seriously floated to have the shuttles from Palo Alto and San Francisco run on the weekends too. This would make Facebook a fully seven-days-a-week company; by whatever means, employees were expected to be in and on duty. In what was perceived as a kindly concession to the few employees with families, it was also announced that families were welcome to visit on weekends and eat in the cafés, allowing the children to at least see daddy (and yes, it was mostly daddy) on weekend afternoons.

I decided to do some reconnaissance. En route to work one Sunday morning, I skipped the Palo Alto exit on the 101, and got off in Mountain View instead. Down Shoreline I went, and into the sprawling Google campus. The multicolored Google logo was everywhere, and clunky Google-colored bikes littered the courtyards. I had visited friends here before, and knew where to find the engineering buildings. I made my way there, and contemplated the parking lot. It was empty. Completely empty. Interesting. I got back on the 101 North and drove to Facebook. At the California Avenue building, I had to hunt for a parking spot. The lot was full. It was clear which company was fighting to the death.

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Full post, including comments