Why I don't write cook recipes

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1) 532.35 cm3 gluten
2) 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3) 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4) 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5) 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6) 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7) 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8) Two calcium carbonate encapsulated avian albumin coated protein
9) 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10) 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 BTU/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radical flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six and seven until the mixture is homogenous.

To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredients nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 X 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnson's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

VC Fundraising Up 62%

The latest Venture Economics Report is out. Venture capitalists rounded up another $5.4B during the third quarter. The total amount committed to 45 venture funds during the three months ended in September represented a 12% increase from the $4.8B collected by 54 funds at the same time last year.

Read - U.S. venture firms raised more in the first three quarters of 2005 than all last year (Red Herring)

Weblogs.com now belongs to Verisign

Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I've heard it from multiple sources, who knows?

Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it's not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against...the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.

Todo a 12

One of the most recent success stories in the retail business in my country is the fast-growing dollar store franchise, Waldo's Mart. It goes all the way to the edges and tells a compelling low price story. Bringing in the Pesos from October 6th's LA Times talks about the onslaught of one price retailing.

From the article:

One-price retailing is winning converts south of the border as Mexicans discover the joys of snagging mini-blinds, underwear and a six-pack of root beer for about a buck each. Like their American cousins, the Mexican chains offer food, beauty products, cleaning supplies and other staples, along with a grab bag of name-brand goods and novelties....

"People are not afraid of going into these dollar stores because they know how much they'll spend," said Monsonego, a managing director at Neoris, a consulting firm....

"It makes perfect sense" that the stores are catching on in Mexico, said Todd Hale, a senior vice president at AC Nielsen. "Rich people love low prices, poor people need low prices."

The low price story, when told transparently and honestly, is a powerful powerful message. WYSIWYG is also a failsafe.

Michael Moritz in the Holy Land

Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz goes to Israel and freaks them out saying that while Israel is nice, China and India are where it's going down.

Read - “Internet entrepreneurs can call us any time” Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz tells Israelis to realize that the new world is China and India. (Globes Online)

How will we die?

David Brooks in the New York Times (if you have acces to TimesSelect, you can access the op-ed article here) explains how we are going to die:

"Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corporation study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition and we'll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another 20 percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We'll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few
life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die.

But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer's disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take 8 or 10 or even 20 years, during which we will cease to become the person we were. We will linger on, in some new state, depending on the care of others.

As the population ages, more people will live in this final category. Between now and 2050, the percentage of the population above age 85 is expected to quadruple, and the number of people with Alzheimer's
disease is expected to quadruple, too."

Bottom line: Neurological diseases and psychiatric illnesses represent the greatest threat to our lifestyles and economy. Beyond the untold human suffering, the economic burden of brain-related illness is already greater than $1 Trllion. What will it be in 2050?

What's Google really up to?

Finally, somebody has figured it out.

Finding time to fix bugs before release day

Pundits (and many other sources) predict Microsoft's Vista (neé Longhorn) operating system will comprise at least 50 million lines of code… assuming the troubled OS is ever released.

50 million lines of code. The scale is staggering. Expect a staggering number of bugs.

Though it’s easy to poke fun at Microsoft, I’m impressed with the company’s recent performance. Windows XP is, at least for me, a very stable product. The much reviled update service seems to be working; reports surprisingly suggest Internet Explorer has fewer security vulnerabilities in recent months than Firefox. But any 50 MLOC program is a monster. How will they test it?

Well-written C and C++ code contains some 5 to 10 errors per 100 LOC after a clean compile, but before inspection and testing. At a 5% rate any 50 MLOC program will start off with some 2.5 million bugs.

Testing typically exercises only half the code. It’s hard to devise tests that check rarely-invoked exception handlers, deeply nested IFs and nested loops. So the 50% test coverage number suggests Vista could ship with some 1.25 million bugs.

There are better ways to do testing that do produce fantastic programs. Code coverage, for instance, can insure every branch and conditional has been taken. It’s required by the FAA’s DO-178B level A standard for safety-critical avionics.

But the costs are unbelievable. It’s not unusual for the qualification process to produce a half page of documentation for each line of code. A 50 MLOC program’s doc might be 25 million pages long, consuming 50,000 reams of paper - a stack 2 miles high. Will Vista undergo this rigorous evaluation? Probably not.
Maybe Microsoft routinely uses a very disciplined approach to software engineering, including the mandatory use of code inspections. Again, the numbers are interesting. Since good inspections typically find 70% of the system’s mistakes, after inspection Vista might have 50 million * 0.05 bugs/LOC *0.30 defects left after inspection, or 750,000 bugs. If testing finds half of those, they’re still shipping with some 375,000 problems. Bummer.

What if Microsoft were certified to the highest level of the Capability Maturity Model? Level 5 organizations employ a wide range of practices to generate great software. A CMM5 project typically ships with 1 bug per thousand lines of code. For Vista that works out to 50,000 bugs.
This isn’t an anti-Microsoft rant. It’s a peek inside the problems any organization has when building huge programs. Though we do indeed have ways to build better code, the costs are huge, and scale exponentially as the program size increases.

The largest commercial embedded systems I’m aware of are some cell phones which have around 5 million lines of code, generally a mix of C, C++ and Java. Though few if any of these companies work at CMM level 5, that 0.1% bug rate would yield 5,000 defects, a hopelessly buggy product. One can only hope that the most important features (like making a phone call) work well enough for most users most of the time.

Firmware size doubles every 10 months to two years, depending on which surveys one believes. Programs are gigantic today, and will be simply unbelievable tomorrow.

Here it comes

For a few months now, I've had that feeling of the impending rush, the way you might feel just before a thunderstorm or at the beginning of a much-anticipated play. I used to feel that way when a copy of Wired or Fast Company hit my mailbox in 1996...

The web is changing, and so fast it's almost impossible to keep up.

But Emily is trying.

Check out: Emily Chang - eHub.

In just a few weeks, she's collected literally hundreds of new companies/projects that are examples of things that are turning the web upside down.

Warning. If you are a buzz lover like me, this page can cause serious addiction.

Hang on, web 2.0, here we go.