Lazy Hacker Babble

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean [YES|NO]

killall Dock

For the first time in a long time, I spent my weekend not working on something directly related to my job. I decided that it’s time that I really got myself to learn VI. I’ve been using the basics of VI forever and when it came to serious code editing in a terminal, I tend to fall back to EMACS. In a GUI environment, my favorite editor is Visual Slickedit but right now I don’t have it for OSX and our servers don’t have it or EMACS installed.

So the first thing I did was try to make VIM a comfortable environment for me to work in. The default black text on white background didn’t work for me so I changed the terminal to black-on-white. Of course, this re-introduced another of those annoyance that always got under my skin. Who the hell chose a dark blue font color for directories?!? Who can actually read that without going blind after 2 minutes? So, of course, that has to change… Out comes the editor and changing the LS_COLORS environment variable…. but wait… OSX doesn’t use that name. It uses LSCOLORS instead… Those wacky BSD guys. Okay, no problem. Let’s see export LSCOLORS=’di=…’…
Uh, wait, that doesn’t work ’cause that just makes things too easy to understand. Instead, how about:

export LSCOLORS=’fxFxcxdxbxegedabagacad’

Uh…yeah… that’s intuitive. Assembly programmers, I respect. Whoever came up with this is an idiot.

My linux version is a bit more customized:

export LS_COLORS="no=00:fi=00:di=36:ln=01;36:pi=40;33:so=01;35:bd=40;33;01:cd=40;33;01:or=01;05;37;41:mi=01;05;37;41:ex=01;32:*.cmd=01;32:*.exe=01;32:*.com=
01;32:*.btm=01;32:*.bat=01;32:*.sh=01;32:*.csh=01;32:*.tar=01;31:*.tgz=01;31:*.arj=01;31:*.taz=01;31:*.lzh=01;31:*.zip=01;31:*.z=01;31:*.Z=01;31:*.gz=01;31:
*.bz2=01;31:*.bz=01;31:*.tz=01;31:*.rpm=01;31:*.cpio=01;31:*.jpg=01;35:*.gif=01;35:*.bmp=01;35:*.xbm=01;35:*.xpm=01;35:*.png=01;35:*.tif=01;35:"

Okay, now it was time to get to know VIM and all its goodies such code folding, color syntax, debugging, intellisense (or it’s new name: omnicomplete), etc. Being the lazy hacker that I am, I first looked around to see what other people already did so I can borrow their stuff. I came across Andrei Zmievski’s presentation and he included his VIM scripts which did pretty much everything I wanted. Sweet!

So, putting on my RHEL5 workstation and OSX machine had no problems. The problem is that I’m also doing a lot of work on RHEL4 machine which only has VIM 6.3 and a lot of the plug-ins don’t work. I had to download the source from vim.org and compile it myself. Since I wanted the ability to work with xdebug, I had to tell the build to include those features. After compressing the source, you can run:

./configure –help

to see all the different options. Basically, I needed to do this:

./configure –enable-pythoninterp –with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.3/config

(Look at the output from config to make sure it found the python config. If not, download and install the python_dev package.)

Then run make and it compiled.

In the end, it was fun to learn something new. I learned a lot more about VIM such as color schemes, plug-ins, etc., and now I have a comfortable environment to work in even without EMACS.

Page UP: FN + Shift + Up arrow
Page Down: FN + Shift + Down arrow
Home: FN + Shift + Left arrow
End: FN + Shift + Right arrow

delete a file: CTRL-delete

cat filestodelete.txt | while read line; do rm ${line}; done

for s in `cat server.list`; do ssh $s uptime; done;

I think a lot of bloggers take their writing seriously even if they aren’t professional journalists. Just like yellow journalism can hurt the reputation of the news industry, bloggers like Michael Arrington can also give bloggers a bad name by selling sensationalism as news.

Arrington posted another entry commenting on Yahoo and once again contradicts himself. He concludes his blog post (I wouldn’t go as far as crediting him with the term ‘article’) with

It took me about five minutes of watching Yahoo’s top two executives talk last month to realize that they had no fight left in them. The fact that they simply gave up wouldn’t matter so much if the only people hurt by their actions were their employees and stockholders. But that just isn’t the case, and now we all have to deal with the fallout.

I guess it’s safe for him that he doesn’t actually have to provide any facts to back up his statements. He’s basically saying that Jerry Yang and Sue Decker don’t have any fight left in them other then fighting off Microsot and Carl Icahn. If they had no fight in them, wouldn’t they just sold the company along with their principals? Arrington also implies that somehow Yahoo is hurting other people beyond employee and stockholders. Who is he talking about? Selling to Microsoft helps consumers? I can’t understand the purpose of Arrington’s ramblings other then him trying to make himself sound relevant and him thinking that if he can yell loud enough that people might think that he’s somehow a participant or insider. I guess without any journalistic integrity he has to rely on fame in one way or another ala Paris Hilton.

I think I’ll stop by a deli and ask the waiter on his thoughts about TechCrunch and quote it as fact that everyone in Silicon Valley feels what the “insider” feels.

The American Society of Engineering Management describes the discipline of engineering management as:

Engineering Management is the art and science of planning, organizing, allocating resources, and directing and controlling activities which have a technological component.

Engineering Management is rapidly becoming recognized as a professional discipline. Engineering managers are distinguished from other managers by the fact that they possess both an ability to apply engineering principles and a skill in organizing and directing technical projects and people in technical jobs.

Of course, this description throws another wrench in the roles within a technology company. Where is the line between technical product management, technical project management and engineering management?

When I go to the bookstore, I see plenty of books in the technology section on software engineering and technical project management. However, there are very (if any) books about technical product management. Why is that? Technical product manager seems to be common enough in Silicon Valley, but there seems to be a lack of printed literature on technical product management. A search online, however, turned up many blogs about technical product management and what the position means.

Personally, I believe that technical product management is very different from regular product management or at least it is a specialized subset of product management. The problem that I often see is when a technology company don’t see the distinction and when product management and project management gets confused.

This lack of clarity in companies also has a negative impact on its people. When a company hires a product manager (non-technical) for what is really a technical product manager role, the person simply won’t be set up for success.

What baffles me and makes me wonder is it only in the tech industry that job roles are so unclear?

The finance articles about shareholders and corporate raiders wanting MS to come back and buy Yahoo reminds me of those parents who has a favorite ex-boyfriend/girlfriend for their child and just can’t accept that they’ve broken up and don’t want to be together anymore.

The news has come out that Microsoft is withdrawing its bid for Yahoo. This is expected to lead to a big drop in Yahoo’s stock on Monday and bring about law suit against Yahoo and its board.

A lot of fingers will probably be pointed at Jerry Yang and that is unfortunate, but given how cynical the world is towards CEOs I’m not surprised. We live in a time where CEOs are viewed those who are there to make big bucks and companies are soulless entities. Jerry Yang could’ve approached his role in the same way. He got to be a CEO, broker a major internet deal, pocketed a lot of money and moved on, but people forget that Jerry founded Yahoo and he really wants it to succeed as a company and I believe that he defines success both for the company, its employees and its shareholders. Shareholders will sue him and Yahoo, though, but I believe he is looking out for share holders and also for the 13,000 people who make up Yahoo.

—–

I originally wrote the above post right after the news broke but didn’t actually publish it. With the latest news of billionaire Icahn trying to set up a proxy battle against Yahoo, it felt like a good real life example of what I said about people looking to make the big bucks but have no real interest in the company or its people. Basically Mr. Icahn is trying to replace the current Yahoo board for the sole purpose of selling off Yahoo. The problem is that if that is all it focuses on then this is a board that doesn’t have any reason to look out for the shareholders because it’s not looking out for the shareholder’s company. If a deal cannot be brokered with somebody quickly, this board has no interest is making sure that the company succeeds.

At the end of last year, I switched from Yahoo! Profiles (Profiles, 360, Mash) to a new team which I have not been able to tell anyone about other then to say that it was a “platforms team”. The past 5 months that I’ve been with the team has been fun, fast, and very exhausting. We are aiming to do something very different then what Yahoo has done in the past and doing something new that can effect a company the size of Yahoo is not easy especially when it involves steering it away from its traditional course.

After months of work, we’re finally able to let the world know the full extent of what we’ve up to. While we’ve already announced Yahoo’s adoption of Open Social and being a part of the Open Social Foundation, it is only one part of what my team is handling. At the Web 2.0 Summit today, our CTO announced Yahoo’s Open Strategy (YOS) which aims to open up Yahoo as a platform. At the heart of it, is the Yahoo Applications Platform (YAP) and that’s the group I’m a part of (shown in the above picture as simply APP). Needless to say, it’s been a pretty hard pushing 2008 tackling such an ambitious project, but it feel nice to finally be able to let my friends and family know what I work on.

For those interested in what I’m directly involved with from the chart… AppBin/Gallery API, End User Services, Core App API, End-user services, Publisher Services API, END POINTS, droplets, Dropzone DB, and Open Social which all part of the “APP” of the first picture.

And for the person who posted the comment saying that YAP is just vaporware, he should know that Search Monkey has gone into private beta to a select set of developers is built on top of YAP and will have a public launch soon so we’re far from being vaporware.

For the many critics of Yahoo that accuses us of not moving, I can only say that while we might not be making splashy daily marketing propaganda that they are a lot of damn serious work being put in by a lot of dedicated engineers to put some serious fire power in the hands of its users.