Checksum Arcanius

I’m having trouble sleeping right now, so I decided to do a catch-up blog post.

First, work has been fantastic. I’m definitely being stretched, which is great for me and I hope for Facebook as well. I’m pretty excited about a couple of the things I’m working on right now, and I may be able to share it sooner rather than later. Part of my sleep woes are the fact that my schedule got knocked pretty off kilter when a friend-of-a-friend reported a bug on Facebook to me, and I stayed up a good part of Saturday night managing that. My schedule has been a little wonky since that, but it has still been a good week overall.

Last weekend, I made it up to San Francisco again and visited with Paul, who I’ve known since 1st grade. I’m pretty sure he’s the oldest friend I have that I’m still in touch with. He showed me his art studio and his apartment in the city, and we visited San Francisco’s Ocean Beach in time for a nice sunset, took pictures in some city-enhancing fog, and ate Mexican and sushi at a couple of restaurants. It was good times. I’ve posted pictures on Facebook that anyone can view.

I visited the family for Thanksgiving, returning my car to Washington in the process. I drove up Wednesday night, staying at my sister’s place in Eugene before arriving in Bellevue in time for a nice low-key Thanksgiving dinner at my parent’s place with some family friends, the Paulsens. We were expecting a more bustling time with my Redmond-based cousins and their kids, but they were all suffering from illness and weren’t able to make it. The food was good but unconventional, as is my family’s tradition. We ate Salmon instead of Turkey, for starters. Afterward, we had a wonderful conversation with our guests.

I also got to see a lot of friends. I watched the Apple Cup with Jon, Maneesh, Bobby, and Ananth, played Munchkin with the 5011 crew, heard Peter Ellis perform his Cello at Kate’s Pub in Wallingford, chatted while walking around Seattle with Theo, met up with a long lost high school friend, watched Ninja Assassin, and generally kept myself busy — or at least occupied! I even met some new and interesting people along the way. I worked from home on Monday, and flew back to SFO on Tuesday morning.

With my upcoming trip back to Washington for Christmas, I will have visited Washington every month since I moved to California, and I think I will have spent more time in Washington after summer than I did during the summer this year. On my trip, I will actually be stopping in Las Vegas to see my brother, sister-in-law, and my new niece, who I have yet to meet in person. I’m am very much looking forward to that.

“Wikipedia can continue to change the world by allowing more articles, or they can slowly fade into obscurity by halting their growth”

— Ryan McElroy, November 19, 2009

I tweeted this about a month ago. Several friends quickly asked why I said it, or what article I was referencing. I said it because I noticed that Wikipedia had just deleted the article about the Titan Robotics Club, the high school robotics club I helped start during my senior year in high school at the Bellevue International School. The reason: the Titan Robotics Club was not sufficiently “Notable”.

Wikipedia has rules for when they delete articles, and they followed their rules in this case. There is still an electronic trail on Wikipedia of the deletion, and why it occurred. I have no specific problem with those that followed Wikipedia’s rules to their logical conclusion. What I have a problem with is the idea of Notability.

The Titan Robotics Club is notable to me and many people I know. I think it makes sense to have a Wikipedia article about the club. However, I understand that the Titan Robotics Club is not notable to everyone. Just as, say, Sigur Ros’ album commonly known as “The Recycling Bin” is not notable to me. But it’s on Wikipedia. And that’s exactly the point.

There is a long tail phenomenon going on here. Maybe not many people care about the Titan Robotics Club, but a lot of people care about a lot of different topics at least as unnotable as the Titan Robotics Club, and they will spend time to write high-quality articles about these things, just as I would spend time to write or improve an article about the Titan Robotics Club, if I were confident that it would not be deleted by some rule-following robot editor. I believe that is the criteria that Wikipedia should use to judge articles — Quality, not Notability.

Wikipedia has been successful because it fostered this semi-unregulated free-for-all knowledge sharing extravaganza. Now, Wikipedia is nearing the limit of what their current policies allow in terms of growth, and it is time for them to change their policy if they want to remain relevant. If Wikipedia continues on its current path, it will fall even further off the exponential growth curve it used to ride, and in this day and age, if your growth is not exponential, you are falling behind.

I rode up Page Mill road again today. This time, I brought my camera and I didn’t lose a spoke at the top. Coming back down was a lot faster, with one scary moment. I was wearing my helmet for the descent. From my house to Gate 4 took me 54 minutes, 35 minutes of which was from the base (I-280 and Page Mill) to Gate 4. I definitely can improve this time a ton — it’s a real grind for me right now — but I’ll have to ride it more than once every two months if I want to get  better.

Studio I to Gate 4 on Page Mill Road

UPDATE: Elevation graph, per Jayson’s request!

The view from the top as the Sun set was well worth the effort:

Almost six years ago, I first downloaded Mozilla Firebird, the web browser that became Firefox. Within a week, the new browser had won me over. It took about another year for Mozilla to release Firefox 1.0, the first generally available version of the new browser, on November 9, 2004. Now, Mozilla is celebrating Firefox’s fifth birthday.

Since then, Firefox has seen over 1 billion downloads and has made significant inroads against the once totally dominant and stagnant Microsoft Internet Explorer. Despite experiments with Chrome, Safari, Opera, and the newer versions of IE (which wouldn’t even exist had Firefox not forced Microsoft into action), Firefox has remained my browser of choice, due in large part to its constant improvements, rich set of extensions, and supporting all the little things that make browsing fast and fun.

In a lot of ways, the culture of Firefox has grown into a religion, with its adherents being encouraged to spread the good word of Firefox, convert their friends, and so on. Nevertheless, it is a religion I feel good about being a part of. So, if you don’t already use it, go give Firefox a try.

Like much of the tech world, I learned about Google’s new programming language yesterday, and listened to the tech talk on it before going to sleep last night.

This morning, an engineer at Facebook started a discussion thread on the language. That’s when I learned about the now famous “Issue 9“: In short, there is already is a language named Go! (as compared to Google’s chosen name, ‘go’). In the somewhat rancorous discussion that followed, one recurring theme emerged: ‘go’ is a bad name for a language, and “Issue 9” (or perhaps Issue9) should be the new name. Robert Greiner wrote a good post about this. In a similar vein, here is why I think a name change is in order:

1. ‘go’ is a poor name choice for a programming language, and of all companies, Google should understand this: ‘go’ is a too-common word that will make search results almost useless (try a search for “debug go”). Even with well-established languages with poor names such as C, searches can be troublesome.
2. As I mentioned before, there is already a language named Go! To stay in line with their “Don’t be evil” mantra, Google shouldn’t squash the little guy, which they are perfectly capable of doing here.
3. There is an epic marketing opportunity for Google here. Many people and the press will love it if Google renames their brand new language in order to do the right thing. At the same time, they can deal with the fact that ‘go’ is a poor name to begin with.
4. ‘Issue 9’ or ‘Issue9’ — abbreviated i9 either way — is a good name for a language that incorporates a computer science idea but is still generic (but not too generic!)
5. There is already a groundswell of support for the Issue 9 name.
6. Issue 9 would not have any search engine name collisions.
7. Others have already suggested incorporating the new name into language constructs. For example the keyword ‘go’ could be replaced (or aliased by) ‘issue’ — this even makes sense!

I hope that Google makes the right choice without litigation. Even if Google doesn’t make the right choice, I hope there is not litigation — it doesn’t actually help anyone in this case. The creator of Go! has gained more publicity through this than a lifetime of toil would have gotten, so in a way he should be grateful. There is no other way most people who are now aware of his language would have heard about it otherwise. I want Google to do the right thing, but even if they don’t, I think legally it should end there.

Finally, I will give mad props to Google — and I promise to learn the language — if they change the name to Issue 9.

This month should be a good and busy one. I have been scheming over the last few days, and this is what I have come up with so far for the rest of the year:

• Post pictures from Peru on this blog (these photos are already posted on Facebook)
• Post pictures from Australia and New Zealand here and on Facebook (I’m way behind on this front).
• Bring the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery up-to-date.
• Swap my Apple Macbook Pro for a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with Windows 7 at work. My plan is for this to also become my main laptop; my current laptop, Graphitica, a Dell D630, will go to my wonderful mom. I will miss the touchpad on the Mac, but I think that pretty much everything else will get better for me with this swap.
• Help the new housemate, Jasmine, move in. This will probably involve finding a truck that I can borrow for a weekend.
• Drive the Saturn back to Washington for Thanksgiving; leave it there, and fly back to SFO (this will lower the car pressure on the house, which after Jasmine moves in, will be at 5. Returning my car to Washington will lower that to 4.) As long as I can occasionally borrow a housemate’s car, I will be fine with respect to transportation.
• Have a few good contributions to Drizzle’s development

That is all for now. More schemes may come.

On Friday, I graduated Facebook bootcamp, a six-week onboarding program that is designed to get new engineers at Facebook up to speed quickly. Overall, I think bootcamp is a good program — it certainly beat the socks off of my onboarding experience at Amazon. Facebook moves even faster than Amazon, yet the onboarding sessions were up-to-date because they were owned and presented by engineers, not relegated to some out-of-date wiki (although, overall, Amazon’s wiki is considerably better than Facebook’s).

At any rate, the best parts of bootcamp for me were two excellent onboarding sessions: one on JavaScript a few weeks ago, and one on  Git last week. The engineers presenting had good presentations, but more importantly, they took time to answer my questions very thoroughly. It is very exciting to be working with people who have such deep knowledge and are so readily available.

One of the tasks during bootcamp is to figure out what team to join out of the teams that are hiring. I found I enjoyed most of the tasks I worked on, so I had trouble narrowing it down initially. In the end, it really came down to working on Scribe, an open-source distributed logging system that Facebook created, or working with the Databases team on what essentially amounts to MySQL hacking. As hard as the choice was to make, it was a good choice to have because I’m certain either team would have been an interesting place to work. However, in the end I had to make a choice, and today I started with the Databases team.

For now, my task is to get up to speed on Drizzle, a stripped-down branch of MySQL. I certainly have my work cut out for me, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.