Hard Work and Success

I've always heard this about successful and rich people: They work hard.I hear that and I think "Well, everyone works hard, it doesn't make much sense".

That is until I read Home based Businesses You Can Start In Your Pajamas in 2010, I opened the article thinking it would make everyone their own boss and I wasn't wrong; you COULD start one of the businesses mentioned there, however, what really surprised me was that as I went through the list, all I could think of was "Nah, too much work!", "Nope, too complicated!", "Not really my thing", "Not in the mood for that", "That's a big headache", etc...

What gives? If you have an idea you should act on it, imagine if Lary page didn't do anything about PageRank idea, we wouldn't have had Google and he wouldn't have been a billionaire. If Donald Trump doesn't follow up on his deals they won't happen.

Why Do We Still Drive?

Cars were invented over 50 years ago, back when electronics were just starting to become popular, back then, it would've been impossible for anyone to even imagine a car driving itself. Nowadays, computers are so smart they can drive, there are cars that can actually drive, but I think that's not enough.

I think the real revolution will be when future (flying?) cars are invented, we're gonna need a new infrastructure, one that controls cars, one where cars don't drive, but rather, are driven by a central system.

Have you seen the movie Babylon A.D.? No? OK, imagine cars flying between buildings like you see in sci-fi movies, here's a picture to make your imagination's life easier:

Now, imagine if cars had sensors, buildings had emitters and a central system that controls all cars. You ride in your car, you choose your destination, your car sends that information to the central system, the system calculates the shortest/fastest path and starts moving your car, since it knows where all the cars in the city are, it can avoid accidents very easily.

Why let humans drive when computers can do the work? Why risk people's lives by allowing people to drive? People sometimes drive crazy, computers don't! People sometimes get drunk, computers don't!

So if ever someone who reads this blog and designs a future car, please consider this! ;)

Microsoft Imitating Emacs

If you've used both Emacs and Microsoft's new ribbon interface which can be found in Microsoft Office 2007 onwards you'll probably be able to relate to what I'm saying.


Emacs is known for it's multi-key shortcuts: Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C to exit, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-F to open, etc..


Let's take Paint in Windows 7 for example, to save as you press Alt, F, A (Alt shows the shortcuts, F opens the file menu, and A is for the Save As menu item), Alt, H, RP to crop the image (Alt shows the shortcuts, H opens the home tab, RP is the shortcut for Crop).


However, the way they implemented it is a lot more intuitive than Emacs's; you can learn them in no time, you just press Alt and all the shortcuts appear in front of you, not only that, having the shortcuts organized by menus and tabs makes it a lot easier to get used to the shortcuts; you press the shortcuts for the menu and then the shortcut for the item in it.


All this supports what I said previously about open source's initiatives.

The Little Details

As Jeff Atwood said:

Ah, yes, the stereotypical programmer response to most projects: it's trivial! I could write that in a week!*

I thought it was just me, apparently it's not. It turns out that all programmers think that way, they see Twitter and they think "A table for users, a table for tweets, a user page, and a settings page."

Let's face it, we all think that way, and the surprising part is? It's true; you CAN create a usable version of Twitter over the weekend, you CAN create a usable browser in a weekend, and you CAN create a usable version of Stackoverflow in a weekend.

Why does software take us so long to create then? There are two reasons: The little details and the little details.

• The little details: The first little details refers to the little details of writing code, for example, the little silly bugs that take ages to find, spelling mistakes, forgotten variable definitions, wrong passwords, wrongly placed files, difficulties with the programming language/framework being used, etc.. All these are problems that a programmer faces that take much of his time but there's no way to predict them.
• The little details: The other little details refers to the little details of a website/software that a programmer usually doesn't think about when making the one-weekend claim.

The best example of this is the reason why I wrote this blog post: In the project I'm working on now, it took me barely 30 minutes to create both the interface and the tables (what programmers usually start with in a project). What comes after that is what usually takes long. Because of some previous experience with Flex, I decided to implement the login system next, so I googled for a way to do it with Flex and Zend and the way that I found required the use of Cairngorm, having used it before, I didn't mind using it now. So I started changing my project to use Cairngorm, separating the different screens into views, adding the model, the controller, the VOs, etc... I started creating the PHP files. After about two hours I had a working login system. Next I wanted to populate a tree control with some data from the database, now because I didn't know how to do that in Flex it took me about 6 hours just to do that, as simple a task as it is.

Programmers don't like planning ahead and dealing with charts and stuff, we like writing code, and I don't see any way to change that any time soon; programmers will still want to write code before they plan, it's in our blood.

The Internet

I know I've blogged about how we can't live without all the technologies we have today but this post is dedicated to the Internet.

It's amazing how many things you can't do when you don't have access to the Internet.

You can't check your email, you can't play Tinker, you can't work on the software you're writing 'cause the documentation of the framework are online, you can't get the story you're reading--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--because you can't find out what lynch means, you can't find a solution to the problem your phone is having, you can't find a background for the website you're designing, you can't check your Facebook account, and you can't remove the tag from the photo of you your friend just uploaded.

It is scary how dependent we are on a single fragile technology. With Google Chrome OS coming, moving everything to the web, one can't help but wonder what will happen if ever something happens to the Internet, will our lives ever be the same again?

Seek the Truth

Why is it so hard for us to seek the truth about what we believe in?

This is how a typical person's belief goes: That person is born, his parents teach him what they believe, once he's old enough he starts to question his belief, but convinces himself that what he believes is right, even though he's not fully convinced with that.

Why do we do that? So we won't have to accept the fact that we've been wrong for so long. That and because we are taught that you should believe blindly.

I don't know about you but I think that is wrong!

If you're taking a test, you write your answers, and before you give your answer sheet, you review your answers and you find a mistake, do you correct it or do you just submit it as it is because you don't want to accept that you were wrong? Sounds silly, doesn't it?

Which is better? Dying believing the wrong thing or correcting yourself and dying believing the right thing?

'So Jesus said to those who believed in him, "If you obey my teaching, you are really my disciple, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'
John 8:31-32

Seek the truth damn it! Question your faith, if it is right you can never prove it wrong, and if anyone can prove it wrong then it's wrong, so you might as well not believe it.

Take Christianity for example, it's been around for over 2000 years so far and no one has been able to prove it wrong, no one can say "It couldn't have happened because if it has actually happened XXXXXXX would have been impossible". No one can say that.

On the other hand, certain Christian beliefs are obviously wrong: Kneeling and praying before statues. COME ON! It's mentioned in so many places:

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Matthew 6:6

and

"Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the LORD your God."
Leviticus 26:1

There you go! A belief proven wrong.

Some might argue that not all Christian teachings can be found in the bible and that many things were started after the bible was written. That raises a lot of questions, one of which is: How do you know who is credible enough to tell people what to do? The pope?

"You shouldn't wear black all the time!", that is one of such teachings, there are many wrong things about this: It's either OK or not OK to wear black, how often is not relevant; it's not in the bible; the reason they claim you shouldn't do that is because black is assosicated with evil, but that is in humans' eyes only, not God's for God looks at the heart.

And don't even get me started on Hail Mary and the rosary!

You know what I think? I think people keep coming up with such rules so they'll feel good about themselves and feel they are righteous and worthy of God's forgiveness, but you know what? Read your bible!

"...I no longer have a righteousness of my own, the kind that is gained by obeying the Law. I now have the righteousess that is given through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is based on faith."
Philippians 3:9

We're Still Missing Something

So there's this guy who lives in another country that I ask for advice, usually, I leave him an offline message on his Yahoo Messenger and he IMs me when he goes online.

This time, it's urgent, leaving him an offline message and hoping he checks it sometime soon is not an option so I sent an SMS to a guy that probably knows his phone number so I cab send him an SMS asking him to go online but I didn't get a reply.

My next attempt was to ask his friends in that country for his number but I didn't find any of those online either.

I left him an offline message and I sent him an email hoping he'll see one of them somehow.

I checked his Facebook profile for his phone number but he doesn't have it there.

I asked mutual friends from other countries if they have his number but they don't.

So I tweeted asking people to tell him that I need to talk to him. My twitter is linked to my Facebook status so it'll show there too.

With all that done, I still haven't talked to him and I don't know when I'll get to.

It's really frustrating knowing that we have all this technology and we still can't get in touch with someone we know if we need to do so fast.

We're still missing something that allows us to get in touch with anyone anywhere.