2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

 

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Occupy Wall Street Is a Failed Revolution

News about the Occupy Wall Street protests and their clones are still in the media and we will continue to hear them, but I think not for too long.

The Occupy Wall Street movement likens itself to the Arab Spring, calls that it represents 99% of all population of the United States. But like it or not, this is a big stretch. I believe that the movement will fail to deliver anything for a few reasons that distinguish it from the Arab Spring.

1. Demographics. For some reason, the media does not talk about this much, but I believe this is the primary reason. If you look at the median age of the population where protests took place, you will see that it mainly varies from 18 to 32 years. That is a half of the population is younger than 18-32 years old. As people get older they are getting wiser and tend to play safe.
2. Wealth. Obviously, youth does not have much to loose. Especially in poor countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In the United States the median age is above 36 years. Now, take into account the number of baby-boomers in spite of all recessions and financial crises accumulated enough money to be concerned about any calamity that could evaporate all their retirement savings. If you subtract baby-boomers (and children, of course), it is roughly 50% (around 140 million people of age 18 – 50 out of a bit over 300 million people of the entire population). So 99% is an overstatement.
3. Goals. Protesters in the Arab Spring countries had a clear goal. The Occupy Wall Street movement does not have a clear goal. Anger is justified, but misdirected. Any meaningful discussions about goals would break up the movement.
4. Climate. The winter is around the corner. Obviously, it is colder than to the South and East of the Mediterranean Sea and it will not get warmer for a few more months.

In essence, this is mostly about getting enough support to gain a critical mass.

The situation can change rapidly if retirement savings do evaporate due to a political or economic gridlock.

Double Standards

There are some things that raise your eyebrows. If you hear news here and there and do not relate them, they are just news. But when you relate them, this is a different story. Like this one.

This summer-fall Apple was trying to convince the government to spend more on research and development projects saying that many great things came out of defense projects (I guess, they liked Siri). Let me say it this way. Apple asks the government to spend more money on research and development hoping to get some benefits. A few weeks later Apple, Google, and Cisco (yes, no fight there, full agreement) tries to press the government for a 1 trillion tax holiday (or roughly $3.3K per capita). What is wrong in this picture? The companies want to get benefits from the government spending on research and they do not want to pay for this. Guess, who is going to pay for this? You, taxpayer.

How about spending your own money on research? Should I mention that Apple, if it were a hedge fund, would be the largest one? Apple has more money to spend than the US government. And this is a company (along with others though) that asks the government to spend on research and $1T tax holiday???

Disclaimer: I am not one of the Occupiers.

Borders Going Out Of Business

I was about to write about something else, but when I heard the news, the other topic became less important. Sad news. Borders is going out of business.

I was a frequent visitor of the Borders bookstore in downtown Boston. A very cozy store where I bought many books. I cannot imagine downtown without the Borders store.

Putting personal feelings aside, it is a sad story not only for Borders customers. It is sad for its competitors. Obviously, there will be a loss in revenues for Amazon and other online stores since many customers browse books in bookstores before going online and placing an order. In other words, online stores benefit from bookstores without actually spending a penny there.

Borders should have reinvented itself by mixing regular book sales with online store and e-book sales. May be Borders considered that and this model did not justify expenses.

But I think this is a form of the tragedy of the commons. Bookstores have a good impact on the society. Kids like to come to bookstores, explore books and play. This is how they learn. This is how they develop curiosity to knowledge. They cannot yet browse online books. They like to touch them, explore their different forms and shapes. There is no replacement for this.

One may argue that Barnes and Noble is still around. But loosing a competitor is bad for the consumer.

Borders will be missed and its disappearance will have a noticeable impact to the society, although, not attributed directly to Borders as it will take years to notice that impact. Sad.

RSS Feeds and Bloomberg (and other sites with no RSS)

For some reason back in 2006 Bloomberg disabled its RSS feeds. So I started to follow Bloomberg less frequently. But Bloomberg offers good news. So I decided to look into this again. Bloomberg still does not offer RSS feeds, but another site does. I found Feed43 (Feed for free).

But first, a couple of words about Bloomberg. It has sites for some keywords – http://topics.bloomberg.com/<keyword>. For example, http://topics.bloomberg.com/belarus (since I wanted to follow the Belarus financial crisis). It makes it easier to get news on a specific topic.

Now all you have to do is to get an RSS feed out of it. This is where Feed43 helps. It allows you to create a feed from a URL after you describe the URL so it could extract your news. It is free and you do not even have to register to use it.

Here are step by step instructions how to do this with an example:

Step 1: Specify source page address (URL)

1. Provide a URL: http://topics.bloomberg.com/belarus
2. Specify the encoding in necessary: <leave empty>
3. Click “Reload”.
4. It extracts the page contents.
5. Please note, it removes leading and trailing spaces. This is critical to know when you configure other parameters in the next steps.

Step 2: Define extraction rules.

1. Provide the Global Search Pattern. This is where your news block starts and ends: <h2>Belarus News</h2>{*}<ul>{%}</ul>
2. Here the {*} indicates any character, which is used in this case to suppress spaces, {%} indicates the news block itself.
3. Provide Item (repeatable) Search Pattern. This is the structure of your news item: <li>{*}<h3><a href=”{%}”>{%}</a></h3>{*}<p>{%}</p>{*}</li>
4. As you can see, here the first {%} stands for the news URL, the second {%} stands for the title, and the third one stands for the news body. These variables will be converted to {%1}, {%2}, and {%3} respectively.
5. Hit “Extract”.
6. Now it extracts your news items.

Step 3: Define output format.

1. RSS feed properties are easy.
2. Feed Title (should be populated automatically): Belarus News – Bloomberg
3. Feed Link: http://topics.bloomberg.com/belarus
4. Feed Description: Belarus News – Bloomberg
5. RSS item properties refer to the variables you extracted.
6. Item Title Template (news title): {%2}
7. Item Link Template (news link): {%1}
8. Item Content Template (news body): {%3}
9. Click “Preview” and you will see the extracted news.

Step 4. Get your RSS feed.

1. Feed43 generates you an XML file with your RSS feed, which you can link to in your RSS aggregator.
2. If you are picky, you can rename your feed.

The concept is very simple and easy to implement. The only missing thing is ability to get a publication date. But it is not always available and it requires a more complex configuration.

Enjoy!

Dec 12, 2011 (update): It looks like Bloomberg has changed formatting. I will take a look at it with a couple of days to update the information above. But the purpose of this post was to provide some guidance, not very specific way. Stay tuned.

Dec 14, 2011 (update): One of the blog visitors suggested that this pattern should now work for the news item (step 3): <li>{*}<h3><a href=”{%}”>{%}</a></h3>{*}<p>{%}</p>{*}</li>

Epsilon Data Breach

Epsilon reported a data breach on Friday. This breach made a lot of shock waves last a few days as new information about impacted clients became known. Banks, retailers, you name it. I received an email Saturday morning informing me that my first and last name along with my email address were exposed (what a wonderful news for Saturday morning, isn’t it!?).

What is disturbing to me is how this breach was communicated. While it is good that I was notified, the notification I received was confusing. It stated that I may start getting spam. What is not clear to me whether information linking an email address to an Epsilon customer was exposed. This creates a possibility of more dangerous attacks – phishing – where you start getting emails “on behalf of” an Epsilon customer prompting users to reveal more information, for example, “You heard our database was breached. Please click *this link* to reset your password”. This information was not communicated at all and it may not be very obvious to the users of Epsilon customers.

My Blog on Twitter

Now this blog is available on Twitter (@ag_blog).

I chose to have a separate Twitter account for my blog since I do not want have all my blog updates be published under my Twitter account. Having two Twitter accounts will allow me retweeting some of my updates under my blog account and vice versa.

Integration notes will be posted later as I am working on integration with other sites.

HBR.org: Thin Men Get Lower Pay than Average-Weight Men

Last Friday Harvard Business Review in its “The Daily Stat” series quoted some results of research done by Timothy A. Judge of the University of Florida and Daniel M. Cable of London Business School. Researchers found that a man in the U.S. whose weight is 25 pounds below the mean earns $210,925 less, on average, across a 25-year career than a man whose weight is at the mean a woman who is 25 pounds below the mean earns $389,300 more across the same time span than an average-weight woman. Based on this researchers concluded that rewards people for meeting gender-role expectations on weight.

While I find the results a bit amusing, the researches may have come to a wrong conclusion that lower/higher weight is one of causes of higher/lower pay. It looks like they disregarded the fact that lower/higher pay may drive choices that lead to lower/higher pay. That is, in this case it is not very clear what the cause is and what the effect is.

John Zimmerman, originator of JAI, dies at the age of 58

I have learned a sad news. John Zimmerman, who conceived and led the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), died last Wednesday, February 9th at the age of 58 from kidney cancer. John left Sun Microsystems in 2004. At the time of John’s tenure at Sun Microsystems, the JAI support group was the best group at Sun that cared a lot about its users responding quickly and clearly to all questions. JAI, a well designed and very powerful Java library for image processing, is a trace John left behind. JAI was/is used in many industries from space to drug research. John will be largely missed.

Memory Problems in Firefox on Mac. Caching Pitfalls

My MacBook Pro has been having some problems – performance problems, crashes, failures to come back from sleep, etc. Often it showed the black screen while heating up. Some signs point to Firefox. Right now I have 3.6.13 running under Mac OS X 10.6.6. Since I like Firefox more than other browsers, I wanted to find a solution.

It looks like I have found one solution. This is a Firefox add-on – RAMBack. It adds a menu item “Clear Caches” under “Tools” and allows Firefox users to release some memory allocated by Firefox for some performance improvement purposes. In the Activity Monitor I have seen the reduction in “Real Memory” from 250M to 215M. Not much, but that is 14%.

Ironically, at some point allocating more memory to improve performance (by caching) slows down applications. This is not only a Firefox problem. This is a more general architectural problem. When designing an application, one should make sure that improving performance of one aspect does not negatively impacts other aspects on which the former depends on.

Another problem with Firefox on Mac is that it seems to be inefficient in handling many open tabs. Firefox on Windows can handle easily up to 150 tabs open. This is an unreachable limit for Firefox on Mac with comparable hardware configuration. Firefox on Mac starts choking with just 20 tabs.