I noticed this blog: thenextweb.com: Google Blocking Negative Search Recommendations On Islam – Why? today (a bit late possible).
It tells about how Google possible is censoring search suggestions which could be controversial - in this case towards Islam.

Most everybody knows about Google in China so we know Google does … lets call it fiddle to be neutral ... with the search results in various situations.
However this begs the question - how do we actually know that Google is acting fairly and doesn’t censor or cheat with the search results in ways we cannot know?

Their revenue comes from advertisement and being able to provide a clear picture of what people search for to provide targeted advertisement.
So it would stand to argue that they can’t really afford to suffer doubt about their objectivity and whether or not they alter or effect or even censor search results.
However how would anybody know?

Is Google now so big that it doesn’t matter if they do questionable things? Can … would … people even stop using Google if it was confirmed that they are actively censoring? Is it even possible? Or are Google now so big that they can do what they want, when they want?

One can only speculate but my trust in Google is diminishing as they keep growing bigger and spand more and more features of the web, and with situations like this and China.
I still use their services, however …for now.

Do no evil.

 

Here in Denmark we received a new tax structure just recently, and one of the items was that people could cash in a sort of “forced tax savings”, which had been 1% over a number of years when the economy was moving very fast. The economical aspect of this isn’t terrible interesting (for this discussion).

But apparently the interest for doing this have been so large that it has crashed the website of the organization which controls this forced saving, because people were interested in seeing how much money they had in their forced savings.
That is the true problem of the internet in its given form. Anything extraordinary happens – and websites can’t handle the traffic.  This has been seen multiple times throughout the years, and it is basically a distributed denial of service attack. Sites can’t handle traffic and shuts down. I tried this morning and could still not access the web site, and I tried yesterday around noon. It is a good thing it isn’t a critical service.

I remember back in 2001 when the twin towers were hit. Every news site I knew was down and where impossible to reach. Suddenly the television news channels received a significant boost, because people couldn’t get their news online and we were forced back to early 90s instead.

Imagine something important happens and you have to get access to your home bank, but the bank is down because everybody else is trying to access it as well. Not a comforting thought.

As more and more of our services and daily life starts to be accessible mainly (only) via the internet – this is a problem which will escalate.
Question is if the companies who aren’t ready will want to pay for being proactive with such things, or they’ll just ignore the problem because it is “extraordinary” events which cause it ….. well, extraordinary or just people wanting to get some money.

 

As anybody who doesn’t live in caves have discovered we’re currently in a state of global financial crisis.
And for those of us who follow the stock development in this climate, it can be quite depressing to view the stock quotes going down, down and a bit more down.
So I decided to make a little morale booster for myself today, which means that now whenever I visit the stock quotes on http://borsen.dk/invester/kursinformation (the main place I get my stock quotes from), then instead of seeing this depressing sight

I now see this much more positive view :)

The functionality is made with Greasemonkey for FireFox, with which you can make some clever and …. *ahem*…. not so clever, functionality.
Basically – all the script does is change the red numbers to green (css class) and remove the negative sign.

Pointless perhaps, but well – we can’t be serious all the time either. That’d be dull.

We had a situation at work where we had a product search routine which we wanted to optimize a bit. So spending some time looking at execution plans, and we started optimizing the various indexes for what we could – changing scans to seeks and key look ups for what we could and so on.

The jist of the routine was a number of specific searches union’ed into one result. I’m not going to post the SQL because it doesn’t matter much for the given situation as it was more the experience I wanted to convey.

So after optimizing all the indexes we could we were still unhappy with the performance, but didn’t really have the timeframe available to change the architecture of the query or database, we started trying more untraditional aspects. First, because the results of the numbers of unions were varying, but all ending up with the same output (of course), we tried to only select the ID’s out and wrap them in a Common Table Expression, and use the ID’s from that to extract the actual product result.

That however did not help much, so we tried a number of other techniques, to identify the bottlenecks.

The strange thing was what actually worked. Instead of using a common table expression to wrap the multiple unions, we made a table variable and selected the ID’s into this variable, and used that to pull products and product information. This worked much better for some reason and I find the result rather counter-intuitive based on what I have tested and read and know about databases so far…… I guess I’ll have to try and reproduce the situation in an upcoming blog piece to see if I can identify why using a table variable improved performance so significantly as it did in this situation.

The lesson I learned from this was to try all sorts of avenues, instead of being bound by what one thinks is the correct way. That is – do not exclude possible ideas without giving them a trial run first, but I guess that is a very important lesson to actually learn, and I'll do my best to apply it.
That was a strange day :)

 

Some time ago I got the offer to visit a “profession coach” for free, so I decided to take the offer and give it a shot.

Prior to that my opinion of coaches and coaching was that it was some new-age-feel-good and tell me about your problems kind of thing.
That it was something only for people who didn’t have introspection enough to actually know themselves and their desire. That was why I never had thought about going to such a one and least of all paying for it.

Back when I studied economics, I read a number of management books, “self-improvement” books, “know yourself” books, some business psychology and all that. All the information from such reading combined with a strong trait of being introspective and self-analyzing, I’ve always been pretty secure in my choices and ambitions. This doesn’t mean that I do not make wrong choices – heck no, but I make the choices I feel are best for me in a current situation based on rationale and analyzing my own desires. Anyways – these traits and this level of knowing myself, was what had formed my opinion about coaching.

So as the day of my appointment moved closer I started to think about what I wanted from the session. I only had the one session and I decided to look at it with an open mind (mostly because it was free).
My first thought would be that no doubt he would ask me “where I want to be in X years” and “how do you want to get there”. And then I was pretty sure he’d try to challenge my ideas about “myself”.

This formed my preparing for the session and on the day I went to the office and got introduced and the session started: “Where do you want to be in 5 years”……. *sigh* Well okay I thought and started to explain my situation and there I felt the chain "break" for him.

I explained to him that I did not really care where I would be in 5 years, but for me it was about how I moved forward. That, for me, “it” is all about the journey and not the destination. That work and career for me was about learning daily and improving myself and then see where that journey takes me and which opportunities open up.
He pulled out a piece of paper and drew a line on it ending with an X and tried to get me to specify what/where X was. That was when I knew that I couldn’t get him to understand “me” and what drives me and that set the tone of the rest of the session. I took the pen and tried to illustrate that my “path” could take me in all directions and I did not want – nor need – a straight direction to a defined goal

He then tried to bring me back on his track, by asking what only felt like scripted questions and I kept feeling somehow out of the box because the questions didn’t fit me. It felt like I had to be stuck into the box he set up, his framework of how people tick.

Sure I couldn’t expect more from a free session, and perhaps if I had multiple sessions, I’d be able to use it for something useful. But as I left I left with the same opinion that I arrived with.
And that is that coaching is for people who do not know where they stand in life and want a clear goal.
For those of us where our profession is the means and not the goal – I feel it is useless.
For those of us who know ourselves and are secure enough in that knowledge – I feel it is useless.
Might just be a bad experience though but it plays into my already formed stereotype. I know now that I would never pay for such a service based now on both opinion and experience.

Coaching to me, feels like a scam. People who’ve read a few books and preys on insecure people. If people need somebody to ask critical (scripted questions), then I’m sure we can develop an automatic coach. I would advice everybody to think twice before handing their money over for something such as this. Read a book instead, google the questions, but just think twice.

Just wanted to make some advertisement for the company I work for: "hedal:kruse:brohus".
We have just released the financial result (sorry – the press release is in Danish) for the last year and showed a healthy growth; meaning a growth in business, number of employees as well as profit.

Granted we are still a "small" firm in the grand scheme of national and international scope, but we leading on our market and we are still going strong with our e-solutions, whether they are electronic catalogue production (a case of a client states they saved 75% on their printed catalogue production by using our solution), e-commerce or likewise.
Plus we are starting to see increased international perspectives and interest in our product(s), so the future looks to be interesting from the perspective of a developer, at least.

I’ve been reading a large number of technical books over the time.
And one thing which often strikes me when I read these books are how often examples and solutions are “outside the box” and I always get sort of envious of how these authors can do that.

Is it an experience thing( meaning a learned thing) or an innate ability?

If it is the first then there is hope for us mere mortals because experience and learning can all come with time. When I read books I try my utmost to look at the reasoning behind what the authors write, and thus I attempt to try and think “out of the box” because I would like to learn how to do so more often. And when I code I try to apply that reasoning to my own problems and see if I can do X or Y instead of Z. It is not something which comes natural to me – that is clear - and I started thinking about why that could be. Of course some of it is a "cost-effective" issue because sometimes you only have so much time to solve a problem and then the tried way can be faster, but it is not especially fun or perhaps even a good way.
It then struck me how much of my educational processes have been “inside the box” and almost punishing outside sort of thinking, even all the way back to public school, which somewhat locks you in that kind of thinking.

Of course some subjects in an education are purely “inside the box” – how to spell (which I never learned well) and all that, however many subjects and problems are not automatically inside the box.

Math for one. When learning mathematics to begin with back in school, it was “formula X” for solving this problem.  “You can only solve a second degree equation using this method”. And well, yeah – most likely that is needed, but that sort of thought process sticks with you. As I moved to more advanced math it was similar, although now we also should mathematical prove that you could (should) use the given formula to solve the problem, and I found few things more dull then that, taking a formular and "prooving it" – well save analyzing poems and stories.

Rarely did mathematics education ever try to encourage creativity, new thoughts and all that. It was all focused on that exam, and getting a grade because you could remember stuff. It was the same when you should analyze poems for various language classes and other such texts. I hated it because it was either using the textbook interpretation or you did it wrong, and come now – what should be open to creativity more than interpreting pieces of “art”.

This mentality followed me on the way to university, for the years I studied economics there. Marketing was “standard” replies from textbooks. Organization and business/international/micro/macro economies, optimization problems and all such theory were similar standardish. You had a textbook which explained what to do, how to do it and why to do it. So you should follow them and get your degree. Sure you could go “outside” the books and draw reasoning, but the sure way, and worse the encouraged way, was to follow the books. "It says X in book Y, so that is why...." type response. 

Whenever we tried to think outside the box we ended up in problems, okay – perhaps our suggestion to do economical crime, empty a corporation value and move out of the country was less then optimal, but it was a symptom of the situation and we tried to challenge the mindset. Whenever we – myself and a couple of fellow students – tried to challenge the “established” theories, we got smacked upside down. We took conventional theory and applied new mindset, and sometimes failed miserable – but at least we tried to think and not just do as we should. But in an education where it is about getting a grade to move on, there was little room for such experimenting unfortunately.

When I then started my programming education, it at least opened the possibility for thinking outside the box, but I could see on my fellow students that it was often lost due to the indoctrination through the educational system.
When we analyzed problems and drafted design papers, it was for the majority of time “follow this method” type of work. Then at least, when coming to larger papers, we found the freedom to think outside the box, however we still followed the methods. What we did instead was fragment a method and take the few tools from a method we felt we could use and combined them, with sometimes little success and other times to great success.  However it wasn’t the “usual” thing to do, and it was clear that this challenged our advisers and teachers just as much, and it wasn’t always well liked by them.
The same thing happened with the programming classes which is where I felt it was the most waste.  You had a problem, you read about a pattern which could solve said problem, and you explained how you followed the pattern. Oh gee, now that’s innovative thinking for you.  

So now with a couple of years of actual programming and problem solving work experience under my belt, I hope that I can get this “outside the box” mentality down, because it would make many problems easier to solve, faster, better, more efficient.
But it surely wasn’t something I felt I’ve been trained to do through the educational process, quite the contrary. But I do feel now it is needed to actually solve a number of problems, unless one wants to turn to others who do the thinking for you, and I do not want that. I want to be innovative, I want to dare be different and I want to solve problems new ways, and not just the old and tried way.  So, I hope it is something I can pick up (soon).

Of course, it might all be an innate ability and then I’m out of luck and will have to rely on smarter people then me to do the thinking for me…….

I stumbled upon one of my old(er) personality tests, which I took at a XML course back some years ago when I was unemployed.  And I got to thinking about how easy it is to actually just answer the tests on how you want the result to come out.

“But you are supposed to be truthful” I hear as a response… well, yeah, but there is a thing called context.

There is a context of how you want to present yourself, and there is the context – or actually often lack of – in the questions of said test.

The context you function in, decides the outcome you want out of the test. So despite I’m a major introvert when it comes to my personal life, then when I am in specific settings, I want to present myself as an extrovert.  This means that if I am taking one of these personality tests – I’ll try to deduct what kind of persona I want to “show” and I’ll answer given that context.  This means that if I’m being tested in a situation where I feel being an extrovert is more advantageous then otherwise, I’ll score high in that aspect... that is the context.
It is in my view easy to read these tests, and if you just put some care into it, you can form the result pretty much as you want, and nobody will be the wiser. Underhanded, perhaps, but I think most everybody does it to some degree, whether they'll admit it or not. Some people change their behaviour given who's around them for example, and that is the same.

Another issue with many of these tests is that they lack context in the questions.  If one then look at many of the questions some of these tests present, then it is quite clear that the questions also revolve around a hypothetical situation, however it is impossible – in my opinion – to answer truthful on a hypothetical situation without knowing the context: “Do you work well with others”, well duh … that depends fully on who the others are. If it is slackers who do not want to put in any effort but just reap the rewards, then no. But that is difficult to answer.
And such things are in my view fundamental flaws with all these personality type tests, and that is why I have difficulty understanding many institutions focus on such tests.  Many of the statements I’ve read over the years from companies utilizing such tests in an application situation, excuse a focus on them with the argument that it is the only way a company can get to “know” the person before hiring him – and my response usually is that, well they do not get to know the applicant. They only get to know the persona the applicant wants to present.  And even if the person answers “truthful” without attempting to fit into the context of taking the test – the result is rather useless because the context of the questions themselves are mostly lacking (or understated) and thus can’t count for anything in real life.

My guess is that it is just easier to group and box people up if they think the results are quantifiable that easy. But ….. outside fun party tricks, I do not see anything useful in them.

Just to mention, the test I fell over was a Jung type personal test, and I scored INTP.