lunaru | weblog | thoughts

This is probably the first Kobe vs. Jordan article writing in favor of Bryant since the three-peat era, when it was much “cooler” to applaud the then-goldenboy of the league. Recently, with the media’s watchful eye always at the ready for some good Kobe-bashing, it’s actually surprising for a writer to acknowledge the possibility that Kobe is better than Jordan. Why not? After all, titles are won by teams, not individuals in the sport of basketball, and so are MVPs, if you follow the contrived guidelines upon which writers vote for the MVP award. Take away team accomplishments (which Kobe has a lot of, btw) and ask yourself, which of the two is the better player.

It’s the end of the Winter 07 quarter at Stanford, but it’s also a bigger milestone for myself. This was my last day of school. Forever. (Well, there may be a change of plans in the future, but for now, it is.)

The title probably sounds corny, like I’m some middle schooler looking forward to the first day of summer vacation, but in truth, it couldn’t be any farther from what I’m feeling right now. It’s a sort of relief that now I am finally done with school after 17+ years worth of education (1-12 grade school, 13-16 college, and 16-17 masters), but it is also a jarring change - I’m now, officially, a full-time contributing member of society. Fortunately, this is what those 17+ years have been design to accomplish.

Of course, the more depressing point of view that I keep revisiting is that now I’m not the one absorbing knowledge - I’m going to have to watch it drain away as time goes by, regardless of how much I try to retain it and learn more.

Mark Cuban is one of those guys that don’t shy away from conflict. This time, his target is Dwyane Wade (why is his name mispelled on purpose anyway?).

The instant-classic punchline has got to be: “You are an amazing player Dwayne. I love watching you shoot free throws.”

I’m not always a fan of Cuban and his antics, but you have to love how he attacks the NBA and shows his nature as a fan. NBA Basketball is probably the sport with the most pink elephants, and it’s always easy to identify hardcore fans from casual ESPN cattle. The hardcore fans don’t mind pointing out the obvious crap (that is, obvious to someone who actually follows pro-basketball). The casual fans will gush at the first superstar that gets kudos from ESPN. Yeah, it’s that easy to spot.

As a wise man once told me, “the advancement of computer science can be measured in levels of abstraction.” Okay, I lied, no wise man ever told me anything like this, although it’s not far-fetched and not too hard to believe.

Now that I am done fibbing, I’ll jump straight to my beef. The problem with abstractions is that they naturally take a multitude of forms, because not everyone can agree on how to abstract away simple mechanisms into higher level concepts. What usually ends up happening is as the levels of abstraction stack higher, the path to a simple task becomes simpler, but we lose sight of the overall picture.

If I take the first level of abstraction as assembly code/machine code, which abstracts away physical CPU instructions into some binary representation, I can argue that this first level of abstraction is as simple as anyone will ever get. It’s just add, subtract, multiple, and maybe a divide here and there. Add in some reads and writes and you’ve got yourself the basic LEGOs of every modern day system.

Our problems start here. The next logical progression is to complain that we need higher order constructs to be more expressive and more elegant in our approach to problems. This gives rise to higher level languages like C. Our complaints continue until we finally reach the pinnacle of general expressiveness, a strongly-typed, polymorphic, object-oriented, virtualized language (like Java) having lost all direct connection to those loveable adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides.

Next we grow unhappy with how the general approach has become so … general… so we develop languages made for specific tasks. Out pops the glut of scripting languages, PHP, PERL, Ruby, JavaScript, VBScript, Python, and [insert your language du jour here]. We live with this lack of generality because we say things like, “Oh, but PHP makes it easier for you to do [Task A] and, oh, PERL is so much easier for [Task B],” all while sounding totally knowledgeable.

Don’t get me wrong. I like choices, but sometimes I think there is just too much emphasis placed on being “politically correct” in choosing the weapons of war.

Exhibit A. I’m building a web site to track financial portfolios in real time. This project entails (from back to front) interacting with several web services exposing interfaces via WSDL/SOAP then wrapping that functionality along with some peripheral necessities into another WSDL web service that manages entire portfolios made up of sets of stock symbols. Next this web service must have a client that can translate and expose these features as an HTTP service. The HTTP/HTML documents generated are then rendered in the end-user’s browser where we would like to have all the snazzy web 2.0 goodies to provide a GUI. That’s the at-a-glance high-bit description of the problem.

Now let’s count the alphabets in our soup (again from back to front). We’ve got WSDL, so I’ll choose to use a specific implementation of XQuery (mxquery by Donald Kossman et al.) to query the web services of interest, process the XML, and spit out more functionality in the web service extensions provided by mxquery. So far I feel good because I’ve tackled a 2 front problem using 1 (non-standard) technology. Next I need a SOAP client, since browsers don’t have direct SOAP functionality. I’ll choose PHP to do this for me since, again, I tackle two fronts with one language - SOAPClient on one end of PHP and bad-ass HTTP functionality on the other end. Afterall, PHP is the Hypertext Preprocessor. Next we need to 2.0 goodness so we’ve got to have AJAX running, making HTTP GET/POST requests to my PHP. Lastly, we’ll need CSS to make sure this whole ordeal doesn’t look like something from circa 1990.

Depending on how you count, you’ll get a total of 4 to 6 technologies/concepts in that quick little sketch. Although it might seem like it while reading through that grocery list of implementation decisions, the choices for what technologies and languages to utilize at what step are not easy decisions. Remember, you want to be able to say, “X makes Y easy to do.”

The problem? That was great and all for an individual project at such a small scale, but imagine having to build companies on these evolving technologies. You want to stay nibble, so you want to utilize all the newest technologies. “X makes Y easy to do.” But, you also want to have a go-to move that you can hang your hat on, because, frankly, the only way you’ll ever be flexible enough to utilize the perfect technology X to solve Y in the real world is if you churn through employees at a high rate. This doesn’t sound like a good solution.

Speaking of XQuery, it officially became a W3C recommendation less than 3 weeks ago. I don’t want to pick on XQuery, because I honestly love some of the decisions they made with the specification - it’s almost as flawless as a commitee decision can be, but it is fresh on my mind, and it was what brought up my angst. XQuery, like all computer science, is an abstraction. It’s an abstraction built to handle the very specific task of wrangling the wild world of XML and taming it in elegance. PHP was an abstraction, an abstraction to wrestle and tackle the evolving problems in an evolving world of HTTP. JavaScript was an abstraction, likewise, to provide the richness to the browser. See where I am going?

No? Okay. Well, I never was a convincing person. The problem here is that these technologies are here to provide the layer of abstraction that is the essence of progress in this field. However, in doing so at such specific means, they diffract our efforts to generalize lower level problems into higher level solutions. Because as we tackle the problems we want to solve, we inevitably take on a whole host of specific solutions and are forced to piece them together. As I said before, this is essentially correct and great. Who doesn’t like to have rectangular LEGOs to make walls and square LEGOs to make floors? The problem arises when you’ve got a work force thats used to using square LEGOs all their lives and are now looking at rectangular LEGOs in that odd manner. Don’t believe me? Try talking to SQL folks about XQuery.

You know you’re good when you’ve got the opposing teams announcer going bonkers. Here’s one of Kobe’s patented fadeaways to break the backs of the Atlanta Hawks.

My countless hours spent downloading and watching Top Gear seasons 1 through 8 has gotten me somewhat confused. What is automotive brilliance? What are the ingredients in creating an automobile that is utterly, stunningly, jaw droppingly brilliant?

The common battleground for arguments and debates exist in a world where we only talk of such exotic beasts but may never in our lifetime touch one let alone drive one. I used to believe that only cars that made it to a 10 year old kid’s bedroom wall deserved such worthy title. But brilliant automobiles deserve more than our average cars because they were made to be brilliant. They were built to shock and awe the world. They are fueled with the saliva dripping from people’s mouths. Perhaps it is also because whenever a new Ferrari or Porsche flashes us with their vulgar looks, we as a society go crazy.

But what has Ferrari or Porsche done that is so brilliant? I say, heritage. Its cars with heritage that live on and become legends and are as influential as global warming. Ferrari and Porsche are brilliant because they have understood the importance of heritage and have made it their central ingredient in the creation of automobiles. The degree of engineering and ingenuity has allowed for acts of over 250mph in cars like the Veyron, magnetic suspension and grip like gravity itself in cars like the 599 GTB and full carbon fiber chassis in cars like the Ascari KZ1. Designs that defy human comprehension helps too because these so called uber cars are just clowns. They are cars you drive as often as you visit a circus. They are carbon fiber wrapped candy-corns with massive servings of horsepower, smoke in your face and rubber on your pearly whites. But brilliant? Yes please. With price tags above most single houses with a 2 car garage, these toys are parallel to those hobbies that we just can’t afford. This psychological epidemic dictates that the more we can’t afford something, the more we want it. Thats why there are posters on sale at Barnes and Noble for $10.99.

Being the love of millions is not an easy role to fulfill either. These cars are the pantheon among automotive brilliance. They are the top of the food chain because they have proved themselves worthy to harness V12 engines, breakneck amounts of torque and still weighing in at the average weight of an econo-box. This is of course not to say that these cars lack deficiencies because like everything built by humans, they are flawed in one way or the other. The Ford GT has proven that there are not enough gas stations. The Zonda has proven that it cannot go over anything taller than a frog and the Aston has proven that world class service via helicopter is not good enough. Maybe that is why so many of us own these cars only in the two-dimensional world of posters. But these biblically, stratospherically, and crushingly brilliant automobiles are just that exciting to look at and daydream over.

So what sparks automotive brilliance? Our love for cars we may never be able to afford, the hopes, expectations and envious stares fuel automotive brilliance. The dream of owning the car that made us wet ourselves as kids drives automotive brilliance. Because automotive brilliance is not only physical but mental and the rewards for satisfying both are just incomprehensible.

I guess Google isn’t perfect after all. Since, this won’t get you anywhere fast. They’ll probably fix this problem soon, but the following screen shot shows you what I mean:

It’s funny because I’ve yet to see an error similar to this one in all my Google Maps uses. Note to users, yes there are alternative map solutions. For example, http://maps.yahoo.com or http://maps.live.com. In fact, live does a pretty good job on this particular query, despite the cluttered interface.

While I was perusing through the net for examples of good website designs, I ran across the usual glut of verdana/arial sites, but there was a surprising showing for Georgia, the new cool, hip, current, web 2.0, serif font designed for the screen.

Being extremely bored with the sans-serif “trend” that started in the nineties and is showing no signs of slowing down, I decided to pick up Georgia for my new site theme. An added plus is that according to the combined font survey Georgia can be found on approximately 91% of Macs nad 84% of PCs out there, not too far below the ubiquitous Arial. This made me feel confident setting my css as follows:

font-size: 11pt;
line-height: 16pt;
font-family: georgia, serif;

At worst, this means my site might default to Monaco or Times for the non-Georgia systems out there, which, in my opinion, is not much more unreadable than Georgia.

My pitch: Need a good-looking, easy-to-read, font that makes your site look hip, yet classy? Don’t want to feel oh-so-web 1.0 with Verdana? Give Georgia a try. At least The New York Times seems to agree.

My B-Day is coming up woohoo! Already got NBA2K7 for XBox 360 and a new Dell Desktop. What else is in store for me?

I love making delicous food for my husband. I feel extremely happy when he says,” um… so good…”