Stroustrup On C++

Edit: Yep! This is definitely a case of Poe’s Law and this interview is a spoof.

An interview with the creator of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup done in 1998 for the IEEE Computer Magazine has recently came to my attention, however I’m not entirely convinced of it’s veracity. Here’s an excerpt of particular interest:

Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought ‘I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things.. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity..

And in the past 16 years C++ has grown to be more complicated if anything with new C++11 and C++14 standards. Can’t say I don’t agree with some of the other points Stroustrup raises about C++. Interesting implications if this is true.

Fun With Robots

I’ve had a bit of fun recently poking around and looking at a few websites’ robots.txt files. Yes, it has been an exciting past couple of days!

For those of you who don’t know, a robots.txt is a file that gives instructions to web robots AKA web spiders or crawlers (e.g. Google’s web crawler). These instructions tell, or more accurately suggest, where the robots can and cannot access and how often they can query your website among other things.

However, the crawlers can often just ignore the your robots.txt suggestions like in the case of Yandex crawler from Russia or Baidu crawler from China or any malicious crawler. This can sometime drive people to block bad bots using access rules on their web server.

Some of robots.txt files are boring like Wikipedia’s but a lot of them contain Easter eggs such as Youtube (for those that don’t know the reference) or contain ASCII art. And StackOverflow apparently doesn’t like the Yahoo’s bot.

There is also the less common and less well known humans.txt that tells you the actual humans behind the website. Google for example makes up for a boring robots.txt file and have a bit of fun with their humans.txt and also adding a recruiting spiel similar to Glassdoor. Other websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Github take an understandably dim view to unauthorized crawling.

So there you have it - a 30,000 foot overview of robots.txt. Now get out there hide some Easter eggs for robots (or humans!) to find.

Nobody "Likes" Facebook

I recently saw this video the other day:

And it reminded me of Paul Graham’s comments about Yahoo:

By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of “Eureka!” I was shouting “Sell!”

Both the Internet startups and the Procter & Gambles were doing brand advertising. They didn’t care about targeting. They just wanted lots of people to see their ads. So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo. It didn’t matter what type.

Sounds awfully familiar, no?

Samsung Google Divorce?

With the recent sale of the remnants of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo Google has managed to at least salvage something from its expensive mistake. That is Google and Samsung kissing and making up with the recent cross patent licensing deal signed between the two companies.

While there has been talk of a Samsung-Google divorce in the past, it came to a head at the recent CES 2014 where Samsung unveiled its “Magazine UX” interface. Which is at the very least is a departure from Samsung’s Touchwiz (which seems to be permanently stuck looking like Android Gingerbread). And at the very worst, a major divergence from Google’s blessed vanilla version of Android

However with this latest deal Google has managed to extend an olive branch to Samsung and as result the company will dial back its Android tweaks and return to a more vanilla offering. Ben Thompson also makes an interesting point about the deal observing:

While Re/code attempted to paint the latter deal as some sort of intimidation on Google’s part, it seems obvious that the reason Google “won” both of these deals was Motorola: specifically, Google likely offered to get out of hardware if Samsung cross-licensed their patents and stopped pseudo-forking Android. Given Samsung’s dominant position in the Android ecosystem, the Motorola bargaining chip very well may have been worth several billion dollars.

This is not the only thing Google is doing to combat the Android forking threat as it is gradually locks down Android with closed source creep attack on ASOP as the company attempts to protect “Google Android” from alternative versions by making Google services the main compelling reason to own an Android device.

This deal is also a big win for Lenovo as it acquires a foothold in the US smartphone market along with Motorola’s branding and infrastructure. And with Lenovo’s proven track record selling low margin PC hardware, they will definitely come out swinging and are likely to snap up a weakened HTC further strengthening their Motorola beachhead.

So for now it seems as though the Samsung-Google marriage is safe, however I think with entry of Lenovo into the smartphone market leaves a number of interesting questions to be answered in the coming months and years. Will Google be able to keep Android locked down or will a forked version of Android emerge out of China? Would this be enabled by the emergence of another API/service provider?

Will Samsung fork Android themselves like Amazon has done? And do they have the technical chops to pull it off?

Whatever happens we’re in for an exciting ride.

Responsive Youtube

So when I actually loaded my website on my phone I saw that my embedded Youtube videos weren’t resizing automatically - i.e. not responsive. Some quick Googling and one of the top results was a nice elegant solution via CSS. I pretty much just added a margin and it was good to go.

.video-container {
  position: relative;
  margin: 30px;
  padding-bottom: 50%;
  padding-top: 30px;
  height: 0; 
  overflow: hidden;
}
 
.video-container iframe,
.video-container object,
.video-container embed {
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

It’s now one less thing to keep me awake at night. Now if I could just find the time to make my website not look like the default bootstrap theme that would be real nice - maybe I’ll extend one of the these themes. And maybe I’ll get a favicon too! One day…