Author: deadprogrammer

Kiddy ride on Ave. U

September 23, 2002
Meanwhile in the Dreamspace…

I’ve had a dream tonight. On my way to work I typed it up on my Blackberry.

I learn that my grandfather, for his work on the Manhattan project, was given a castle in England. I go there to take a look.

From the outside the castle looks like a bigger version of some of those cute Tudor style houses in Brooklyn. When I go inside, I meet a housekeeper, who tells me that she is very happy, because she was able to rent an apartment in a castle across the street.

Thinking about why she would want to rent an apartment in another castle, I proceed. Now I see why she wanted another apartment: even though it seemed to be made of brick on the outside, on the inside my grandfather’s castle is made of wooden boards. I’ve seen boards like that on the New Yankee Workshop: they are huge, very old and not produced anymore. Furniture makers pay a fortune for them.

I start going up to the second floor when I notice a weird thing: even though every floor is solid, there are no ceilings.

I reach the last floor (third) and enter a room. Surprisingly it has a ceiling. I meet my dad there. I tell him about my doubts about the structural integrity of the castle.

In order to demonstrate me how strong the castle is, he shakes the entire structure. It feels kind of how the Manhattan Bridge sways when huge trucks cross over it, but stronger. Meanwhile, I turn out to be standing over a void in the boards of the floor and almost fall down.

After this demonstration dad tells me that there are ropes connected to the walls of the castle that are tied to a ring in the middle of the house. That ring nexus is what reinforces the building.

Then I had a secondary dream about typing this up in my LiveJournal.

September 20, 2002
Die Kunst der Rant : Contrapunctus 2

“How may I help you?” is probably the stupidest question that salespeople ask. There are hundreds of things that salespeople mean by it. It can mean “Do you even know what you want?”, or “Are you here to buy something?”, or “Buy something, dammit, or get out”, or “Dude, you are wasting my idle time” or “My manager is making me say this, but all I want is see you leave”.

“How may I help you” implies that you need help. It suggests, that you canâ€™t make a decision on your own. A shopper that answers “yes” is obliged to come up with an explanation about how the salesperson can assist, and itâ€™s not an easy thing to do. Many people donâ€™t even know what they want yet. On the other hand, people that actually know what they want and have questions will seek out a salesperson and ask those questions. Thatâ€™s of course when the salesperson will be nowhere to be found.

But guess what, turns out, there is an alternative! I’ve been reading this book about buying used boats. The author mentioned that real professional boat salesmen don’t use the phrase “How may I help you”. What the say is “What can I show you?” You see, this question is very hard to answer negatively. To make a sale, the salesperson needs to know what the customer is interested in, show off the product and make a pitch. “What can I show you?” is a question that is easy to answer and hard to walk away from. Itâ€™s a polite way to ask a permission to launch a sales pitch.

Strangely enough, I donâ€™t think that I ever heard “What can I show you?” asked in a store.

September 19, 2002
Die Kunst der Rant : Contrapunctus 1

Like everybody else, I am frequently annoyed by waiters, clerks and salespeople. Like all geeks I am a little deficient in the communication department, which makes it harder.

After getting somewhat bad service from a waitress in Blue Note I even suggested to a friend of mine the following idea: a world where waiters are replaced by a computer interface. You study an interactive menu and your orders are transmitted directly to the chef.

Her argument against that was that some waiters are real characters and are really entertaining. And that’s entirely true! Howard Johnsonâ€™s in Times Square has a really unique staff of old timers, probably the most polite waiters I met. Waiters at Peter Luger’s are gruff steak experts. Without them the atmosphere would not be the same. On Dave Attel’s Insomniac I’ve seen a late night cheese steak joint where you are expected to curse out the servers and they are expected to answer in kind. Itâ€™s not a family restaurant, of course.

But on the other hand, I find ordering in fast food places somewhat tough. The dude in Coffee Connection (Dunkin’ Donuts rip-off) habitually adds milk to my coffee when I ask for cream. More than that, he lies when asked if that’s milk in the coffee. I carry special glucose detector sticks to check if the soda I get brought is really diet (because I am on a low carb diet). Sometimes it isn’t. Many ordering experiences go pretty much as described by J.S. Bach of the Rant, his coolness JWZ. (don’t be lazy, open the link. It’s short and hilarious).

Now, that I can understand. I worked at glorious Nathatns Famous at Coney Island, and I have a really bad short term memory. When you do mind numbing tasks all day remembering even the simplest instructions is very hard. Well, of course the menu was a bit more complex than popcorn and soda and I had to keep track of many more different things, but still…

All you need is a PDA. You get a menu beamed to it before you enter. You select your order. You beam the order to the waiter. When done, you beam the payment. Not a single word needs to be spoken. Ahh, future.

September 19, 2002
The Mystery of Obidos

Whoa, caught amazon.com while it was down.
They are showing a page with Rufus, the Amazon dog.

By the way, I was meaning to write about that for some time now. Did you ever notice enigmatic word “obidos” in Amazon url?

Some theories from usenet:
Castle near Lisbon
OBI (Wan Kenobi) + DOS (Disk Operating System)
‘OBI’ = Object Broker Interface
This seems to be the correct answer though: Obidos is is a major port on the Amazon river.

[update]
Livejournal user hallerlake had this to add:

“I worked at Amazon for a couple of years, and can mostly answer that.

Obidos is the area where the Amazon is “concentrated” – it narrows to a point about a mile wide and a couple hundred feet deep. It’s the chokepoint of the Amazon. A wry sense of humor turned that to the naming scheme.

The Amazon Marketplace (auctions+zshops+third party) code was called Varzea for similar reasons – it’s the delta point of the amazon river, where the river fans out.

Amazon wrote their own web serving environment because the selection of scripting/webcontrol languages when they got started was so lousy. They had to call it something, so obidos it was. :) ”

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Obidos is huge, it might be over a gig by now. I don’t think it’s that bad, though. I haven’t been at Amazon for a few years. For a long time Amazon ran on the Netscape web server environment, then eventually moved to a specially tuned Apache. But yeah, the webservers had a lot of RAM in them so that we could fork a bunch of different processes… and a garbage collector got added to take care of some of the memory leaks. Even still we had a service that killed and restarted processes every hundred accesses or so. It wasn’t pretty.

I don’t know who came up with the name… I’d bet on Shel Kaphan or possibly Joel Spiegel. Shel set the direction for the company’s software development and architecture, including standardization on C (instead of C++) due to easier debugging. Certainly for the first few years he was The Guy for software architecture; these days I would imagine Al Vermeulen has that task.
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