May 27, 2005
More time wastage
When I see people like Rico Mariani get in on this stuff; well, its got to be worth the wasted time on yet another blog quiz.
 I am a Defender-ship.I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You? |
May 25, 2005
Religion
Ben Hyde: The VI reference mug, shown at right, is available here. The emacs reference place setting for for twelve is not yet available. 
Stolen from Sam Ruby's blog.
May 11, 2005
On the question of research funding
Prof. Dave Patterson, current President of the ACM, professor at Berkeley, inventor of RAID and other highly useful things and all-round nice guy (I had the pleasure of taking a class under him once), writes a great article on news.com.com about why US research spending must be accelerated or the US risks losing its current lead in IT to the asians (specifically India and China). Worth a read.
Ranting about H1B visas
Professor David Farber at UPenn (currently on sabbatical at CMU?) runs a list called Interesting People. Its news and opinions about political and technical stuff, most people on the list are very left leaning, so I feel just at home.
There was a thread going on about outsourcing, jobs, foreign students; you know, the whole, usual, deal. So I ranted. I ranted about why people with an H1 visa who are competing with US citizens for jobs have things stacked against them. I ranted about why H1 visa holders are not the people taking away the jobs of US citizens. About why outsourcing hurts us more than it hurts the US citizens.
Read the whole rant in the extended entry below.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Rushabh Doshi
Date: May 5, 2005 9:14:10 PM EDT
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US natives????
Dear Prof. Farber,
I wonder why the H1Bs get such a bad rap (I am an H1B holder myself).
From an H1B's perspective, things are stacked against us. We're on a 6
year death-timer, after which we cannot stay here any longer or have
to play visa games with the INS. We cannot apply for any government
jobs that require any sort of security clearance. A lot of companies
will hire permanent residents (green card holders) or citizens only.
We're not "stealing" jobs away from our American (or green-card-holder
and above) counterparts - we compete for the same jobs at the same
salary levels. We don't work for less money because a company is
sponsoring an H1 visa. If anything, we get the raw end of the deal -
we pay regular tax, but don't get to vote (taxation without
representation, some countries went to war over this), we pay
social-security taxes but don't get the benefits if we leave. Most of
us make major remittances to family back home as well. Which is all
_fine_ with us.
Outsourcing jobs to India or China or anywhere else hurts H1B holders
just as much as any citizen or green-card-holder. In fact, it
probabaly hurts the H1B a lot more - given two candidates who are
equal in all respects, a company is more likely to hire a citizen /
GCH since they don't have to bother with the time and money hassles
involved in dealing with the INS.
H1B caps and making the Green Card process more difficult will only
hurt the US in the future. Our countries have been complaining of
"brain drain" for a long time. The reason is obvious: the brightest
and smartest students in our countries aspire to come to the US for
education. After they're done, the next steps are a good job, a green
card and eventual citizenship. What do you have in the end? - a nation
that constitutes some of the brightest minds from the planet.
Now you make it very difficult to get a green card and kick people out
if they don't have one. India and China and other countries that once
complained of brain drain should rejoice - they're going to get some
of their people-capital back. Not only that, US employees should fear
their jobs even more - the people that you just kicked out are going
to go back and become part of Indian or Chinese or other native
companies that are not interested in doing simply "outsourced" work
but a company that competes on a global scale with the likes of
Microsoft and Oracle. After all, its the internet, and moving a few
"bits" of your product across the wire to your market is not very
expensive.
The US immigration policy is (seemingly) all screwed up. The US makes
it incredibly hard for a normal, hard-working,
never-done-anything-wrong person to become a citizen and does
everything it can to make that person go away. Having a somewhat
looser immigration policy in the past has helped the US become the
giant that it is. Tightening this policy and kicking people out is
like tightening the noose around the giant's neck (bad analogy, but
I'm not very good at those).
Thank you,
-Rushabh
PS: These opinions are strictly personal and do not represent those of
my employer or of anyone other than myself.
May 8, 2005
Camping pictures
Kristin, Paul, Jill and I went camping a couple of weekends ago. Pictures posted on dosamonster.
May 6, 2005
I like working here again!
We reversed our policy on the anti-discrimination bill. The official email should be posted on the press pass site soon. Scoble posted about it here and the press pass site is here.
[Edited 6.15pm] The full email from Steve Ballmer can be found here
May 5, 2005
atoi
Yesterday I was with a bunch of geeks and we were playing poker. Naturally, the conversation was rather geeky and turned to the topic of good interview questions. Several people on the table mentioned that they liked to tell their interviewees to implement atoi. I've never done that (ie asked someone to implement it) and that got me thinking about whether it was a good problem.
My conclusion: its not. Its a terrible problem.
If my interviewee told me that her ideal implementation of atoi was
int atoi ( const char * string )
{
assert( "You are an idiot for using this function" );
}
I'd be happy and move on to the next question.
Why is atoi so bad? First of all, its got no failure semantics, or rather, very ill-defined failure semantics. If you're implementing atoi in a C-world, and the string is a bad string, or is greater than the integer range, what number do you return? Whatever answer you pick (0, -1, -32768) is wrong. There is just no way to get out of this problem other than the programmer who used atoi knowing what values to expect from the string and then validating on those values. And even that is rather bug-prone and not-at-all safe (how do you validate that you your string represented something between -32768 and 32767?).
Second problem: atoi just fails in a unicode world. And it doesn't have anything to do with wchar_t's being 16 bits long. Oh no, that's just the beginning of your troubles. What if the locale was set to arabic and you had to read right to left. And what if the numbering system was just completely whack so you can't easily convert from a char to a number using the ASCII table? Ugh, ugh, ugh.
My conclusion: if I was being interviewed by a person who asked me to implement atoi, I would think twice about working for/with them. And no, I'm not going to ask my interviewees to ever implement atoi, except perhaps to elicit the "Are you out of your mind response".
May 4, 2005
May 2, 2005
How Republican are you?
Stolen from Laura's blog. 12% seems right, but then again, its yet another internet quiz.
12% Republican. | "You're a tax-and-spend liberal democrat. People like you are the reason everyone else votes for guys like Reagan or George W." |