Hello Eurocomm?

Few years ago I bought a Nokia 9110 cellular phone-FAX, after having developed Hebrew support for it. Eventually, I upgraded to Nokia 9210i. Now Eurocomm is advertising Nokia 9300, and I am considering buying one.

However, there are two problems:

  • Their ads advertise a Web site and toll free phone number. No FAX number even though the 9300 has also FAX capability and part of its target market are the deaf.
  • The Web site is not effective for selling Nokia 9300 because they do not answer people who fill the online form and inquire about the product (if to judge from my experience in going through the above twice).

It is a shame to require deaf people to go in person to Eurocomm to buy this cellular phone if the normally-hearing can arrange for this without leaving their homes.

What is the biggest enemy of innovation? Not what you think!

The January 2006 issue of the magazine TheMarker features innovation as a special topic. One of the articles in the issue was a roundtable discussion with six innovation managers. One of the questions, which they were asked to answer, is: What is the biggest enemy of innovation?

They gave the conventional answers – flood of innovations, failure to integrate with other business functions, failure to share intra-organizational knowledge, insufficient management support, clinging to status quo, culture of punishment for making mistakes, etc.

No one of them gave the following answer:
The biggest enemy of innovation is the tsunami of bad ideas.

Every manager or venture capitalist, who opens up to new ideas, is familiar with the deluge of crackpots with hare-brained ideas, good ideas which currently have fatal flaws, nags, single-minded evangelists of a single idea – but a mediocre idea, etc.

Some ideas require a lot of effort to evaluate them and finally reject them, only to be confronted again with them, brought by another crackpot, who is repeating history. Others get implemented and when they fail, they cause a loss, burnout and depletion of the funds available for new ideas. And the worst – all those nags. Yuk!

Even the most open-minded manager or VC eventually gets burned out after having been subjected to the first 100 nags with 200 mediocre ideas. On the other hand, people, whose ideas have been rejected several times, are not encouraged to bring more ideas. The next idea, which may turn out to be The Next Big Thing, suffers from the previous bad ideas.

At the risk of bringing upon myself a deluge of crackpot ideas, I am asking for ideas how to avoid the dilemma of not missing a good idea on one hand, and avoiding time, attention, discouragement and expenses associated with rejection of thousands of bad ideas on the other hand.

Neuroscience is now fashionable due to Ariel Sharon's brain former influence

Neuroscience Tutorial – an illustrated guide to the essential basics of clinical neuroscience.
Neurosciences on the Internet.
There are also other related Web sites.

Jun. 11, 2012 update:  the link to neuroscience tutorial has died.  Adie Harrington suggests the following resource:  http://www.surgicaltechnologist.net/resources/guide-to-brain-anatomy/.

The Income Tax System in USA and Business Licensing system in Israel

Thomas Frey predicts the collapse of the Income Tax system in USA.

Few weeks ago I was in the offices of the Israeli organization of small businesses (by the way, simply-smart.com, their Web site designers, royally botched their job – at least as far as the Web site viewability under Mozilla 1.7.8 at the moment of writing this blog entry is concerned; 2.5 second long surfing session using this browser version would have showed them that the current Web site design is totally broken) to see an exhibition of art by people with disabilities. At this opportunity, I saw on a table a report about the woes of the business licensing system in use in Israel.

It seems that like the American Income Tax system, the Israeli business licensing system is being abused by using it to accomplish additional politically-desirable ends besides ensuring the safety, health and honesty of the business.

Mort, Elvis and Einstein – don't forget also Busy Shula and Maxwell!

Sriram Krishnan’s famous “Lisp is sin” article (shredded to tears in reddit.com) was mentioned in Lambda the Ultimate. In this article, I met for the first time the Mort, Elvis and Einstein trio.

While I did not know them at the time, the concept evoked in me painful memories. You see, nine years ago I worked on a project, which needed a sophisticated control for navigating through an hierarchical decomposition of a widget (tree control, in other words). This control was critical for the project’s ultimate success, so we spent a lot of time trying few versions and polishing it. As the project progressed, we used the control in few places in the software. Since each place had slightly different requirements from the control, I developed it as a C++ class with virtual functions. Each client of the class inherited from it and overrode some functions.

The design was very beautiful, sophisticated and a source of pride for me.

Eventually I finished my work on the project and phased out of it. The project entered a maintenance and enhancements phase. For this phase, other software developers were hired. Few years later I met the project leader and asked him how things are going.

He had me floored by telling me that his programmers had to re-implement the tree control class. The original design was too complicated for them to understand it!

Every time I feel bad about the absence of LISP and its ilk in mundane software development jobs, I recall the above painful anecdote.

Now that I know about Mort, Elvis and Einstein, I can see that my beautiful tree control was Einstein-level work, requiring Einstein types to understand it, apply and extend it. However, the maintenance programmers, who followed me, were Mort types. Groan!

Definitions of the trio can be found in:

I have an issue with Microsoft’s definition. They define Mort as a VB programmer, Elvis as C# programmer and Einstein as C++ programmer. I feel that this is too narrow spectrum of programmers.

I would like to add to the spectrum a persona to the side of Mort. This persona, called Busy Shula, is a courteous and busy secretary. She is very good at her main work. She just is not trained to program computers. She fiddles with configuration files to optimize the way her PC is facilitating her work flow. Some applications have configuration files which are really programs (like Tcl or Emacs’ elisp). So she sometimes gets exposed to programming concepts.

On the other side, there is Maxwell. He is a programmer, for whom C++ is not expressive enough. He devours the special assembly languages used by microprogrammed processors in the morning, and groks the most convoluted LISP, Haskell and O’Caml concepts at night. He also hold on his own when discussing parallel programming and even hardware design issues. He invents new programming languages and even new processors.

I believe that the best way to accommodate all those personas (Busy Shula, Mort, Elvis, Einstein and Maxwell) is to design a powerful library system for a powerful computer language (Scheme comes to my mind as a candidate). The library will feature high-level abstractions, which are convenient for the Morts and Elvises. The Einsteins and Maxwells will be able to look under the hood, rewire, and extend as necessary.

If a Mort or an Elvis gets bogged down with a problem implementing a new feature, he needs to have an Einstein on call to help him with the difficult parts of his work.

On the other hand, the Einsteins and Maxwells would not be bogged down with the tiny UI tweaks and polishes which differentiate among amateurish&irritating UI look and feel and professional&pleasant one.

Busy Shula also needs to have a Mort around to help her whenever configuration work is so extensive to constitute real programming.

I got fed up!

In my response to someone else’s response to my response in someone else’s blog, I wrote:

I got fed up!

I am Deaf, not hard of hearing!!

Due to some mysterious reason, I fall between the chairs among the hard of hearing and the Deaf.

In the Deaf Community, I am considered to be hard of hearing due to all kinds of reasons, such as educational level, which are not relevant to the communication ability per se.

Among the hard of hearing, I am considered as deaf. When Keshev (an Israeli organization of the hard of hearing and deafened adults, which went bankrupt at 1992) was active, I was not eligible to be a regular member in this organization, due to a prohibition in the organization’s constitution on letting deaf persons become members of Keshev. When Bekol (another organization of the hard of hearing and deafened adults, which replaced Keshev and is active today) started the “7th Ear” group (a social group of the hearing impaired, which was active in Tel Aviv area), I was not invited to participate in this group due to the same reason.

Functionally, I am deaf as far as my ability to use sound to help me understand speech is concerned. I can hear some sounds using a strong hearing aid, but not to use them to understand better speech.

And if anyone says again that I am “hard of hearing” rather than “deaf”, I’ll force him to sit down (and fall) between two chairs!!!

The Reverse Engineer

The first cryptic E-mail message looked like a spam. I deleted it. The second cryptic E-mail message still looked like a spam. The third message came from Lysdon, whom I once employed as an information retrieval specialist in one of my projects. He asked me to reply to the E-mail messages from the Halutza UFO Institute.

Three days, a nice bank deposit of advance fee, a shower and change of clothes later, I saw the UFO in an underground hall in the Halutza UFO Institute. Seldon, the Chief Scientist of the Institute, explained to me that their scientists found few dark slabs, which have time-varying regular structure suggesting that they are storage devices. They also found that one of the slabs is undergoing changes all the time, and correlated some of those changes with changes in lighting and noise levels in the hall.

They made an experiment of trying to read the slabs and transfer the read data to the Institute’s computers. Reading all the slabs yielded about 10TB information, which was reduced to 30GB after lossless compression.

My assignment was to decipher the information and figure out what does the software embodied by the information do.

(To be continued sometime in one of the potential future timelines. Meanwhile I want to continue to read Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software!)

Did Superman, as a baby, escape from a black hole?

While Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg did not say so explicitly, there is an hint in their The Science of Superman that when he was launched by his biological parents to space, he had to pass through an event horizon.

To put things in context, Larry Niven already speculated about Superman in his Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex article, but from a biological point of view.