Who Makes MacBooks

October 28th, 2006 • General

15.4″ MacBooks are on the way, but this time they’ll be manufactured by Foxconn. As of 2006, MacBooks are made by Asus, while MacBook Pros are made by Quanta Computers.

I was wondering, could it be that because Asus computers are so great, MacBooks turned out to be a better deal than Pros. All I hear is complains about Pros, from over-heating to random shutdown. Let’s just hope that Foxconn guys know what they’re getting themselves into.

How much does mmmzr make?

October 27th, 2006 • 3 comments General

So here’s the next $1,000,000 site. But this time it follows a pyramid scheme. In short: you buy a spot in a column, you get your money back when the next person buys the spot above you, then get the same amount of money on the next person

I believe that Tadashi is either a big fan of chess, or just an evil genius. Think about it , if he makes it to only 20 rows, he’ll be making around $1,048,576 per column, or $7,340,032 for all columns.

But he’s not taking all that money to his own pocket, he’ll have to pay the people in lower rows. Let’s do the math. I’ll use 10 columns to simplify things:

“Refund” is what Tadashi has to pay the previous owner of the spot, and “Reward” is what he has to pay to the person before that. He’s already reached the 11th row, so he’s made about $1024 * 7 = $7,168. Not bad at all.

Putting aside that he makes money in binary, did you notice a pattern there? Starting from $4, or his third customer, Tadashi’s profit is exactly 1/4th of the price of his ads. So unfortunately, after 20 rows, he’ll only be making $262,144 per column, instead of the aforementioned million. Still not such a bad profit.

I might be jumping to conclusions here, but these ads get a little pricey at 14th or 15th rows, I’m sure there will always be people willing to buy a spot like this for $32K, but the majority probably won’t.

The $1/px deal was sweet because people thought about it as “a bunch of pixels”. One of the largest real estates there is around 90x80px, which costs $7,200; still cheaper than the 10th sale on mmmzr.

Now excuse me, I’m having a “why didn’t I think of that” moment.

On Lisps’ Acceptability

August 26th, 2006 • General

Reading Stevey’s argument about why Lisp isn’t acceptable Lisp, I came across this quote:

My prediction: someone will get tired of waiting, and they’ll Torvalds Arc into obsolescence before it’s ever released. (If you don’t get the reference, it’s what Linux did to GNU Hurd). (emphasis mine)

I don’t think I’ve see “Torvalds” being used as a verb before.

Defuse Bullshit

August 23rd, 2006 • Asides

We lie for three reasons:

• To protect ourselves.
• It’s a gamble, it might just work.
• We want to be seen as better than ourselves.

Enjoy the primer on how to detect bullshit, by Scott Berkun.

Blogging, The UNIX Way

August 20th, 2006 • 8 comments General

“I like WordPress.”

Ok, now let me try this again:

“WordPress sucks!”

Phew, feels like I just threw away a heavy burden. What a relief. Now if you’ll allow me to explain:

Current blogging software is limiting, in the sense that most of them are just data entry front-ends using some RDBMS. This makes it difficult to edit content without a client (or a front-end), it makes it more difficult to migrate from one software to another, and every other software uses its own schema.

Add to that the jungle that is WordPress internals, the slowly-creeping bloat, the endless amounts of identical plugins, the lack of unit tests, this annoying rant, and what do you get? /bin/blog.

Ok, maybe not. But that’s the best name I could come up with for my new brainfart. Anyhow, for now I’ll call it /bin/blog, say it “Binblog”, and name my child after it.

The Big Idea

Remember how UNIX is supposed to be about integrating tons of tools together? Every tool is supposed to do one thing and do it well. You can use pipes for communicating and redirecting data, maybe signals every now and then, but that’s about it. UNIX is just like lego, in an operating system kind of way. And that’s precisely what I love about it.

Now, I want to have my blogging software to be as simple as that, but not simpler. I want to follow a free-spirit approach, where my data isn’t bound to the software that’s running it and I can easily manipulate it without restraint.

Plain text’s the keyword here.

Regardless of how I implement /bin/blog, it’s going to be very minimalistic and completely extensible, not in a WordPress kind of way, but in a UNIX kind of way. It might even be a command-line utility to construct blogs, in similar fashion to MoveableType’s rebuild. Yes, everybody hated it, but you have to admit, MT’s performance, after generating the blog, runs circles around WordPress.

The Pros and Cons

Here are my reasons for why I mostly want plain text:

• rsyncability. I’ll be able to save my drafts and published posts, then simply rsync them to my server. Compare that to logging in to administration, choosing “Write”, digging my way through all the fields to fill them, fighting with the tab button, and cursing and swearing.
• Most FTP clients can also sync directories, in case rsync isn’t available, so that leaves me with another option.
• With plain text, I can grep, find, sort, count words and paragraphs, and sorely compress my data to move it to another server.
• No more mysqldump and reload process.
• Easier to figure out the structure than learning a database schema.
• Cheap updates (I haven’t benchmarked yet, but I think fopen() is faster than mysql_connect, I’ll have to check).
• Self-contained posts. When every detail of each posts (including comments) resides in a single text file, it’s much easier to email.
• Creation and modification time are controlled by the system.
• Use whatever editor you like. You can even use Vim over SSH to fix that typo.
• Can be implemented as part of a minimalistic plain-text wiki.

On the other hand, plain text introduces a few issues, but I don’t find them big compared to working with a database:

• Performance. Searching plain text is much slower than searching and indexed database. However, using a database to index posts is trivial.
• System-dependent permissions. Of course that’s not completely different with databases either, but a database server does use an extra level of authentication.
• A bit steeper learning curve, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the system.
• Can be implemented as part of a minimalistic plain-text wiki.

Just An Idea

/bin/blog is just an idea. I can start working on it just after my Reboot. I don’t want to split my energy between the two, since /bin/blog is going to take some time to implement.

What do you think can go wrong with a plain text-based blog?