This book is a fascinating look at how Facebook started and what it means to go from a college dorm room to a multi-billion dollar valuation in just a few short years.

It is not surprising that there are some casualties on a rocket ride like that, but you cannot explain away all of the deception, backstabbing and betrayal that easily. The book points a finger squarely at Mark Zuckerberg the original brains behind the operation, as the likely cause of many of Facebook’s troubles. The book does elude to the irony that is someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who is by all accounts socially awkward if not entirely inept, running the biggest social networking site the world has ever seen.

The book is a work of non-fiction (or near non-fiction), but it reads like a fiction novel and is easily digestible.

I am the first to admit that I resisted the lure of Facebook until late in 2009, so I was kind of late to the Facebook party. Now with all of the bad press Facebook has been getting lately because of their seemingly cavalier handling of their user’s personal data, I am starting to question whether I made the right decision to create an account at all. This book clearly raises the question as to whether you should be trusting your personal data to Mark Zuckerberg.

A friend brought this book to my attention recently. As an experienced enterprise Java developer who has recently added Objective-C to his toolkit of technologies to solve problems with, I was happy to see a book so close to my heart. I have started (but not yet finished) reading this one and so far it seems well worth the read for those of you who want to also add Objective-C to your Java skillset.

As of today I no longer need to have Lotus Notes installed on my Macbook Pro! Woo hoo!

I was very excited at the prospect of uninstalling it (yes, uninstalling bad software is all it takes to get me excited). Lotus Notes is far and away the largest installation on my laptop. It weighs in at an incredible 792 MB! The next largest application I have installed is iPhoto at 430 MB and then follows Gimp at 263 MB. There would be very few people that would argue that Lotus Notes provides more functionality per megabyte than Gimp does. In my experience IBM is especially good at producing bloatware, but even this is beyond any rational (pun intended) explanation.

What makes it worse is that Lotus Notes is a just plain awful tool to use. So its a one-two punch, first it takes up ridiculously unjustified amounts of disk space, then it rubs salt in that wound by just being horrible to use. Nothing has ever made me long for Microsoft Outlook like Lotus Notes does, and that is saying something since I am a self-confessed Apple fan-boy.

I am pretty sure my laptop sighed in relief when I deleted Lotus Notes, like a giant burden had been lifted from its shoulders.

The only upside to Lotus Notes, is that it does have an Apple version at all, although this is more due to the fact that the recent versions are based on Eclipse (ie. Java), not so much that IBM really loves Apple users in any way.

Farewell Lotus Notes, it was depressing and frustrating to know you, and I hope we never cross paths again.

I recently changed ISPs to use Road Runner (not really by choice, it is just happens to be who Time Warner Cable works with for their bundled deals). And boy has it been a real eye opener as to how bad the ISP industry really is.
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In a previous post (Apple MacBook Pro Memory Upgrade) I detailed the reasoning behind choosing to perform some upgrades on the MacBook Pros in my family instead of buying new ones. In this post I will go over the process needed to upgrade the hard drives to give us a little more room to move for the next couple of years and hopefully some performance improvements as well.
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Just received this email from the Zembly team at Sun. They don’t specifically point the finger at Oracle, but it doesn’t take a genius to join these dots.

We regret to inform you that on November 30th, 2009 we will be suspending the zembly service.

More than three years ago, we started this project with the goal of making it easy to create next-generation Web apps. Our original tagline was “Build the web, using the web,” and the ideas we were incubating around platform-mediated Web applications, Web API mashups, and social programming were brand new.

We learned a lot along the way. Your confidence and enthusiasm helped us improve the project and do amazing things that we never imagined when we began this journey.

Thank you to everyone who’s been with us through the ups and downs. It’s heartening to see that many of the best ideas pioneered in zembly have started to appear elsewhere. With your support, we’re proud to have contributed to the DNA of the Web.

For more information about the zembly suspension, please refer to the FAQ section at http://zembly.com

Finally, if you have questions, please contact us at zembly-support@sun.com

All the best,

– The zembly team

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4150 Network Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054
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When I buy a tech gadget, whether it be a cell phone or a laptop for example, it always costs me twice as much as everyone else. No matter how good a deal I try to find, it always ends up costing me exactly twice as much as everyone else. Does this happen to you?

It is caused by Geek Wife Gadget Purchasing Syndrome, wherein I cannot buy any cool technology without also getting the same thing for my wife because she also covets cool gadgets.

We had planned to update to the latest MacBook Pro this coming January, as that would mark 3 years since we purchased our current identical in every way MacBook Pros. However, in these turbulent economic times and because of the syndrome mentioned previously, we decided to explore alternatives.

In the end we decided the laptops were not too bad and we could probably squeeze another couple of years out of them, but we had to do something about hard drive space and RAM. So this post details the RAM upgrade and I will detail the hard drive upgrade in another post.
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A colleague of mine forwarded an article to me during this last week, which he prefaced with the following statement …

guys, I’ll write it in all caps and bold:

I AM NOT PROMOTING OR IN AGREEMENT OF ANY OF THE POINTS THE ARTICLE MAKES.

… which begs the question, why did he send it not only to me, but an entire team of people? I choose to believe it was because he is an enlightened soul that understands that the best way to reinforce your own beliefs is to read more of the opposing point of view, not more of the view you already have. I am lucky to have a few of these souls working for me right now.
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It is one of the most venerated books in the world of Software Engineering. It is such an icon it even has its own nickname and even the acronym of the nickname is easily recognized by most software architecture and design zealots.

I am of course talking about Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. Also known simply as the Gang of Four book, or even more simply as just GoF.

I in fact never purchased the book myself, but I have definitely read it and it has been on my bookshelf for the best part of a decade now. When I first moved to the United States I moved into an apartment that was being rented and paid for by the company that hired me. It was the heady days of the .com explosion so there was a high rate of turnover at the company. When I moved into the apartment, it was clear that the previous occupant/employee had only just vacated and had left some personal belongings behind. One of the items carelessly discarded was a copy of Gof.

Now to be fair, the book will put the hardiest of readers to sleep pretty easily – it is most definitely a tome of knowledge, not a work of entertainment. But nonetheless, my copy is certainly worth the dead trees it is printed on.

As with many new ideas, there is rarely just one person thinking about them. It usually takes these visionaries getting together and coming up with some common terminology and cohesive thoughts to really launch the new idea into the mainstream. This is what GoF did for Design Patterns, and it is in this launching that its main value resides.

It is hard to believe that this book is already 15 years old. But InformIT has just published an interview with 3 of the gang (Vlissides died on Thanksgiving Day in 2005) to look back on the book, its influence on the Software Engineering industry since its release and whether in the rapidly changing world of app stores, mashups and the like, whether the book is still relevant.

InformIT: Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson > Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson