Obesity and software developers

Recession is still going on in both Canada and USA (there are reports that even way beyond those two) and there are many speculations in media about what needs to be done to fix things. Naturally, businesses everywhere are trying to reduce cost of production and streamline processes. Experts are digging up for hidden obstacles that prevent productivity to get unfolded in its full grace. Some findings of those experts are unexpected. For example, as many newspapers and media giants like CNN reported, obesity. Obesity of workforce is a barrier for US economy, they say, to achieve productivity levels needed for getting off the recession hook.

When I shared news with a friend of mine, she was somewhat puzzled how obesity can be such a serious issue for productivity (while being a serious issue for other reasons of course) if all manufacturing is primarily done outside of North America. In a way, that make sense. It is possible to picture how obese worker can produce less in his shift than his lean counterpart somewhere in South East Asia where reportedly many manufacturing jobs were outsourced. But in service industry, office environment it is less imaginable. Obese person can type on computer keyboard as fast as non-obese. The same applicable to phone conversations, car driving etc. They say productivity loss is due to lost workdays by medical reasons too but obesity does not look in that regards as some kind of significant exception - when fall comes, every office experiences the same wave of lost workdays when employees are dealing with cold and flu.

At the same time, I don't want to pretend that I understand much in macroeconomic studies. There are many things in the world that do look improbable but they are true. Those studies most likely have solid stats and math behind it and, after all, there are still some manufacturing jobs left in North America. I guess mere facts that I live in Vancouver and work in software development industry kind of distorting my perception of the problem. There are not too many obese people in our city and almost none in the industry.

That brings actually a strange observation - not only software developers but IT people in whole are fairly lean individuals in general. I saw armies of them in college, then in BCIT where different seminars organized by IT companies are held and at multiple industry events like those large and pompous Microsoft happenings in downtown. They are very often skinny and sometimes not incredibly athletic. But almost never obese or close to being obese.

Why is that? There are evidences that brain is the most voracious consumer of energy in human body. If you write code you need to let your brain to consume the energy at extremely high levels. Writing code can be a very exhausting process mentally and, strangely enough, physically. After intense sessions of coding, debugging or even researching, I feel sometimes like I finished Marathon distance - tired and hungry. Overall speaking, the same is applicable to writing in general, not just coding but, say, blogging or essaying.

Saying that, by the way, I am not trying to say that software developers are smartest individuals on the planet (well, some of them pretty close to it I guess - Scott Guthrie of Microsoft for example). There is no definitive correlation between thinking hard while producing code and quality of produced code. Sometimes hours can be spent without any descent output delivered.

At the same time I knew quite smart individuals who don't look like those who practice yoga on regular basis. One guy, expert in numbers theory, whom I knew from university years, looked like the kid from the animated movie "Up!".

In a long run, I would say, obesity as a productivity preventer will be removed as obstacle. It may happen because life style and food habits of people in North America are shifting to better. Chances also are that IT people will continue to stay lean. And hopefully Starbucks will not discontinue its Fruit&Grain bar - great product to maintain productivity while staying skinny.

Kafka and iPhone

Although my prime occupation is related to technology, my personal relationships with various technologies can be described in terms of Kafkaesque ambivalence: I don't really crave that much for being up to date when it comes to latest gadgets or cool services like Twitter but I push myself hard enough to get the latest when working on a concrete web project. Due to that peculiar fact my personal arsenal of available innovations gets updated rarely and almost always not by me.

That's probably why I have got iPhone only now, long after hysterical tsunami of iPhonification got subsided (well, unless you don't consider iPad as some kind of variation on iPhone theme). My wife bought it for me so I would stay better connected with the world. That made sense for my old cell phone was as ancient as the one you could see in the sequel of "Wall Street" when Michael Douglas receives back his personal items at the very beginning.

I have to admit - all that iPhone hysteria is not entirely baseless. iPhone is really cool piece of electronic engineering. Touch screen provides with shockingly new experience for those who relied solely on keyboard and mouse for the last decade or so. Numerous iPhone apps and bells and whistles can make anybody feel deeply entertained and in a way powerful. But for me personally the greatest revelation was its book store, iBook.

That's not to say that I never bought and read electronic books before. I have Kindle and did quite a bit of reading on it. But my Kindle compared to iPhone is like medieval arquebus to M-16. Reportedly, such comparison is not totally alien to Amazon.com executives for as per news from media Amazon.com purchased a hi-tech company in New York to develop its own touch screen technology in response to Apple's challenge.

The ease with which one can read and leaf through iBook is very addictive. Moreover, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a great deal of classic literature available at iBook store free of charge. Majority of them are made available via Gutenberg Project. I was able to download and peruse books I did not open since early childhood, those like "Treasure Island" and "Black Arrow" by Stevenson, or "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Conan Doyle, or "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott. Reading it in English, recollecting its Russian translation read far away and long ago, comparisons and finding familiar details was increadible fun.

One author though was of special interest for me - Franz Kafka. Some of his books are also available as free downloads for both iPhone and Kindle. Nevertheless, I went extra mile and bought "The Metamorphosis" with a great deal of comments and data on author for something like $2.99. I did start reading that story on computer sometime ago (at really good website of ReadPrint.com) but never had a chance to complete reading due to lack of spare time. iPhone is making now possible for me to fill that embarrassing literary hole in my not so classical education. I read whenever I have a moment. Even in the line up in Starbucks.

Reading Kafka makes me feel kind of delirious; reading about his life makes me delirious and sad. His family ended up terribly in flames of WWII. He himself died of hunger at a quite young age (not of the lack of food but due to some complication with his throat). His final will to have all his writings to be burned unread is equally delirious and sad. Reading Kafka on iPhone inevitably brings up an idea that if iPhones were available in Kafka's time, sadness component maybe much smaller in his biography (I don't mind delirium of his writings though).

I was driving yesterday morning to work and saw some homeless dude pushing rusty shopping cart with his dirty belongings in front of him. He had easily recognizable Apple's headset under stained baseball cap. Apple's market penetration is almost absolute at this point. Nothing Kafkaesque about it though.

Labour Day

That was a busy summer for me. I had several projects to work on and also was on short trips around my province and Washington State. So, in a way, it did not feel like much of a summer in a sense we usually perceive that joyful season with its supposedly careless time passing. It is Labour Day now. Kids and college students are going back to school tomorrow. Weather turned to its regular Great Pacific North-West raining (I like it though, no complaints). Summer is over and all business people presumably are back in saddle tomorrow morning.

Celebrating Labour Day for a number of years now I never bothered to inquire what exactly origins of this holiday are. Well, Google, as usually, was quick to shed some light in the issue. What I have read surprised me. First of all Labour Day is a holiday in many countries, all of them related to British Empire in the past even though celebration dates do differ. It is first Monday of September in Canada and USA but say in Jamaica the date is May 23. Origins of that holiday in Canada can be traced to Toronto Typographical Union's strike back in 1872. That's not overly surprising per se but the cause of that evidently memorable strike can be stunning to a regular inhabitant of 21st century: workers were on strike demanding a 58-hour work week.

The source I was reading did not specify how long the work week was for Toronto typographical workers at the time but one can assume it was longer than 58 hours. Regular work week in Canada and many other countries now is 40 hours. People do overtime of course (some are really eager to get it for it is double pay or so usually) and many work part time jobs with anything between 32 and 8 hours. That's kind of incomprehensible to imagine what was it like to work over 58 hours per week as a worker in probably very spartan conditions, low productivity and most likely mentally dulling environment of 19th century Toronto typography.

That made me think a bit about what exactly my work week length looks like. Of course, I do as overwhelming majority of Canadians 40 hours per week plus some extra hours at nights when I work with small businesses of my area. But is it really 40 hours I do what I do for living? I mean, do I really plan, write, debug, deploy, integrate etc code for software all that time? Well, not exactly. Sometimes I can spend long hours thinking about some freakish issue in my code and spend few minutes fixing it when solution somehow emerges.

One of the weird things about it is that once you have your mind focused on the issue, it does not really matter what you do at any given moment. I mean, I can be on my way to washroom, roaming around about office without real purpose or even talk to somebody when suddenly I can see the light in a tunnel so to speak. I wonder what my management or co-workers think of me in those moments. I am not sure they realize I continue staying focused on the problem, almost against my own will. Oftentimes I do think of it when driving home or even while sleeping.

In that regard, my work week definitely not 40 hours but something very different. It can be much shorter or much longer depending on circumstances or some particularly mind bending puzzle I need to solve one way or another. In a way, 40 hours work week is quite ritualistic guideline that has little to do with actual state of affairs.

I read about a 19th century English scientist who visited once a plant of Stanford, a prominent American industrialist. It used to be 60-hours work week there back then in such conditions that the Englishman later wrote that "6 months of working here would justify suicide". I guess back then titles like "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss might have been considered as a cruel joke or downright stupidity.

It is hard to say to whom we should be thankful more for bringing down working hours and improvement of working conditions - Trade Unions or technological revolution. Maybe both. But most likely combination of true democracy and capitalism did the trick as a fundamental prerequisite making, paradoxically, Labour Day free of labor.

Primes distribution as creativity pattern

When researching on some complicated issue for transforming Word files into PDF format programmatically, I came across an interesting website: Project Euler. That site offers numerous mathematical problems for solving by means of computer programming. Many of them are about miscellaneous properties of prime numbers.

Leonard Euler was a Swiss mathematician who worked most of his scientific life in Russia. He has contributed a lot to mathematics and anybody who learned math somehow in the past would be able to recollect a thing or two related to that renown scientist. There are many discoveries made by him in the field of prime numbers as well.

Prime numbers is one of the most incomprehensible concepts in arithmetics. It defies intuition and, is a way, common sense too. Paul Erdos, probably most eccentric mathematician of all times, spent many years researching the topic and was so baffled by primes properties that he re-phrased Eistein's expression - maybe God does not roll dice in the Universe but something really strange is going on with prime numbers.

Best known property of primes is probably that there is infinite number of them among integers. The proof of that fact is a classic example of the approach called Reductio ad absurdum. This is when you pretend that there is a greatest prime number somewhere far away and disproving that by the ability to construct even greater prime. Another property is that there are primes separated by just one integer, like 3 and 5, or 41 and 43. They are referred to as twin primes. One of the biggest mysteries in math is whether or not there is an infinite number of those twin pairs.

But one particular attribute of primes plunges me into abyss of ultimate mental discomfort each time I think of it. It is distribution of them among other integers. It is proven logically, mathematically, beyond any doubt, that there are intervals of consecutive integers of any imaginable length that do not contain any primes. You can pick some unknown (but existent!) integer N and surely there is no primes between N and (N + 1000). Or N and (N + 1000000). An so on.

That curious feature led me to a weird analogy. Creativity as a process (at least as I am familiar with it) is highly irregular. Primes distribution is a good way to describe it - there can be extremely long periods with not even a hint for any creativity spark, almost endless intervals of mental drought. Then something comes up and I am able to accomplish a little bit, not necessarily terribly significant. Does infinity of primes can be anyhow hopeful consideration in that regard? Yes and no, as professional database administrators and software consultants love to say. Yes, because there is always a chance that any given fruitless period will end. No, because days of human life are very much limited by its nature unlike number of primes among integers. Despite those long primeless stretches, primes do have important ally on their side - infinity.

Twitter for revolutionaries

Today is May 1. A holiday of a sort, International Workers' Day. This holiday is traditionally loved and much celebrated by revolutionaries. Not technology or scientific revolutionaries (those folks usually quite indifferent to any kind of holidays) but traditional ones, those who rebel against social injustice no matter real or otherwise.

Times much changed since those days when paper leaflets were major conduit for propagation of revolutionary ideas. Technological marvels are seemingly fully employed for that purpose nowadays. And probably nothing else used for cause as heavily as Twitter. Sickle and hammer, red star or Boston tea if you will were unbelievably replaced by cute blue chirper.

Since Twitter was released two major social upheavals were reportedly organized with Twitter as communication medium. One is weird and not entirely understandable to me unrest in Moldova, tiny country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. Masses there were trying to storm government buildings, twitting to each other operative information. The world remembers those events primarily due to Twitter's involvement than otherwise.

Second time Twitter's usage was noticed was during extremely complex situation in Iran, right after elections. Social protests there were emotional, widespread and bloody. I don't want to pretend I understand politics in that part of the world either. But I do remember reports that Twitter's usage was quite profound there with lots of counter-intelligence and false twits employed by government secret services in order to deceive protesters.

Hugo Chavez, Bolivarian Twitterist

Last week all major news companies readily reported that Hugo Chavez, well-known South American politician, set up a Twitter account. Mr. Chavez is a president of Venezuela, he portrays himself as Bolivarian revolutionary. He is also relentless critic of Unites States policy towards Latin America (and other places). His decision to have an account on Twitter was very surprising, moreover he himself characterized Twitter just couple of months ago as "tool of terror".

Things changed from those recent days. Not only Mr. Chavez acquired scores of followers (some put the number as high as 100 000) he also promotes Twitter. In an unusual way - he urged two other famous revolutionaries, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Evo Morales of Bolivia, to join him on Twitter. Whether they would decide to join or otherwise is not clear yet. But if they do, Twitter, a technological child of the country all three of men are or were in some state of standoff, would boast of being associated with most legendary revolutionaries and anti-americanists alive. That would be a globalization on the most grand scale possible, unimaginable point of co-existence of arch-nemeses.

One small detail though should be mentioned here. Mr. Chavez and Mr. Castro both known for being captivating and verbose orators. At the same time Twitter has limitation of 140 symbols per tweet. Chances are it might not be enough for them to express themselves fully via Twitter at its present state. Whether or not Twitter would consider tailoring its tweeting policies to accommodate revolutionary oratory is not entirely clear. But if they do I would be sorry once again for not being fluent in Spanish. As a kid I saw some old films where El Barbudo was giving revolutionary speeches. It was in a language I did not understand but absolutely mesmerizing nevertheless.

State of Cul-de-sac

I was working with Microsoft Silverlight technology lately.The project I was given had some specific requirement which would be practically impossible to achieve with regular server/client approach. So my options were ActiveX, Flash or Silverlight. For variety of reasons I've decided to go with Silverlight. That seemed to be a simple enough project but nevertheless it plunged me into a state of mind I somewhat reluctantly call a state of cul-de-sac.

There are many different states of mind. Well, I better say states of my mind for I have no idea how other minds function (Malcolm Gladwell has more to say about it). I can spend a lot of not incredibly exciting hours trying to categorize and describe them but it would be better to concentrate on just two of them.

The first is, like I mentioned, is a state of cul-de-sac. That state happened very frequently once I entered high school, then in the university and then again once I started to deal with computer programming. This state is characterized by acute sense of being in some kind of dead-end, like you are browsing in unfamiliar neighborhood, getting lost and ending up in a cul-de-sac. You have no idea where you are, there is no way ahead since it is a cul-de-sac and going back does not look too promising since you just come out from there. So you are standing in front of that cul-de-sac, scratching your head and making serious face so local kids, who play hockey nearby, will not think you are one helpless miserable moron. Descriptive enough?

Being in that state can be quite depressing. That what happened to me once again when I have started digging into Silverlight. I was in one cul-de-sac, then another, then another... I was googling through myriads of highly technical webpages, I was trying to follow video tutorials, I was considering buying a ridiculously expensive programming books... I was almost hearing quiet grinding sound of my overheated mind.

Then, at one undetectable moment, amount of information I was exposed to somehow transformed into very weak, almost intangible sense of connectedness between different parts of the seemingly chaotic whole. It felt like I caught the tail of Silverlight and my grip on it grew stronger and stronger with every minute passed in front of my computer. At some point of time I even thought I had a clear vision of overall Silverlight architecture (it turned out to be just one of the incarnations of that technology) and that thinking really pushed me forward.

And then I have entered into a second state, which is referred to by programming grands like Joel Spolsky as simply "zone". There is no clear-cut beginning of the "zone", and you only understand your being there when you (usually suddenly and roughly) pushed out from that state by some external factor (like co-worker asking something or phone ringing or alarm of a car parked outside goes berserk). The longer you stay in that "zone", the better chances that something good appears although it is not 100% guarantee.

Stay in the "zone" is also not entirely homogeneous. It is rather staccato of iterations "cul-de-sac/zone" with different duration each. Gradually duration of the "zone" gets longer than of cul-de-sac. When it is much longer and when urgent IM of your boss severs your happily creative presence there you can start feeling acute sense of hunger. It was always puzzling me - all you do is sitting in front of your monitor with fingertips flying over the keyboard and nevertheless you feel so terribly hungry like you were playing soccer 3 hours in a row. Something extremely voracious for energy going on while your are in the "zone", no matter what spacial position you are at.

So, I was working on that Silverlight project, feeling frustrated, then hungry, in the cul-de-sac, then in the "zone". Eventually, I found solution and learned several interesting concepts by the way. And while those concepts are related to Silverlight only, there is another one related to the whole process of creative thinking. That concept can be formulated this way:

No matter what you do, you will never find yourself in the "zone" unless you spent some time in a cul-de-sac.

That's honest truth about any creative process and, in my opinion, a major factor in stopping yourself from creative expression. Thinking of potential frustration of being in cul-de-sac can be really scary. The only thing that mitigates it a bit is when you have a genuine interest to the subject matter. And that's probably why myriads of psychologists and HR professionals highly recommend to do for living something you genuinely love.

Googling around

The sheer process of learning has been reshaped beyond recognition since I was student. Ratio "Search for info/Learn info" greatly shifted towards "Learn info" since Google (and others) make the process of searching pretty damn good. That does not mean of course that it is always easy to find what you need; sometimes it requires certain effort even with all power of Google. But at least you don't have to rush to faraway library or irritate people around you with seemingly repetitive questions. Since Google (and others) keep evolving chances are search process may get even easier in future.

There is even neologism popped up, to google. I heard it first few years back from a strange source - episode of "Law&Order" where Assistant District Attorney was going to google up some secretive criminal. It is a very regular verb nowadays, hardly neologism anymore. Everybody use it. Seems like Microsoft considers it pretty damaging to the future of their newly launched project because numerous blogs of Microsoft educators advise you to "Bing it" when something is required. I did not hear yet "Yahoo it" or "Yandex it" (that's Russian search engine) but that does not mean nobody employs those constructs.

So what do people google up? Simple answer - anything. I know a girl who is crazy about real estate so she googles everything about it, from realtor's reputations to eco-friendly housing. Developers google when they need to find answers for multitude of technical questions. Travelers google best rates for hotels and air tickets. Shoppers google for shoes and books, former residents of Bishkek google for latest news from Kyrgyzstan (it is bloody unrest there at the moment).

Sometimes to google is the only way to get info fast even though it may not be pretty. My cat has walked away outside and did not come back. He always returned before. I was looking for him in vicinity, making those hissing sounds we believe are detectable by cats. Could not find him. Googling brought sad discovery - sometimes cats go away to die alone. My cat was old. That maybe what he did. Why do cats sometimes prefer to die alone? Well, that sounds like another reason to google. Seems like it would also be a very sad googling.

The Talent Sourcer and aspen sprouts

Like many who have LinkedIn account I came across that message. It propagated itself across the web with such speed and decisiveness I can't stop thinking of such matters as geometrical progressions and factorials. The message is written by a manager from Microsoft whose title is Talent Sourcer. He goes to Russia to look for software engineers to join Microsoft Bing team and asks for referrals. He wants them to come to work in Redmond, WA - the very cradle of Microsoft.

His mission is pretty understandable. Microsoft is in mortal combat with Google for better piece of Search Engine market pie. Bing, launched not that long ago, needs serious reinforcements to compete better with Google. So fresh ideas and beautiful minds are in need. I am pretty sure they are being searched for everywhere, not only in Russia. It just happened to be that this particular Talent Sourcer was quite successful in exploiting social network to make himself heard.

Knowing roughly what exactly going on in Russia with computer science and science in general, I would say that manager will be overwhelmed with applicants to interview but it may be harder for him to make selection than it used to be few years ago. Russian university centers, where minds and ideas are boiling, are not exactly in perfect shape. So many scientists and technology guys left for the West (and Far East like Japan) and so many are prepared to follow them I keep recollecting the story of Yellowstone National Park.

In Yellowstone wolves were hunted down to extinction and for about half of century there were no wolves at all. Without predators pressure elk herds multiplied and aspen trees began to experience serious decline. Elks just simply ate aspen sprouts in such quantities that very few survived to become full grown trees. Then in 1995 wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone and aspen woods bounced back to century old level because number of elks decreased.

You may think of those selected applicants for Bing jobs at Microsoft as aspen sprouts. Long before they grow to become real scientists or engineers, they are scooped out of the country by companies like Microsoft. The difference is unlike Yellowstone aspen sprouts they will eventually become full grown scientists and engineers but not in Russia. It is unlikely that some of them will be considering moving back to Russia although it is not altogether impossible. Western businesses take those sprouts and replant them in the extremely fertile soil of places like Redmond or Mountain View.

Now, the very Russian question may pop up - who is to blame and what to do? In general the picture is not extremely favorable for Russia. It loses its best and brightest to faraway land with few prospects getting them back. But look at the picture a little longer. Those kids who will eventually end up in Redmond will have opportunities to realize their potential they may never had in their lives back home. If they stay in Russia, the old country will not gain much if those talents are buried speaking biblically (and there are plenty of reasons for why they may be buried). Is Microsoft to blame? Hardly. Microsoft is a business and it is a business nature to look the very best of human resources everywhere. Its behavior is no different from say some Russian energy company that may be employing experts from abroad.

If Bing gets better everybody would win on the global scale. Internet will be delivering relevant results faster for any web surfer in the world, Russian kids in Redmond will be glad to see their work, Microsoft may profit, and even Russian mass media might offer a new source for national pride just like they did when they mentioned about figure skating trainers who coached Canadian and US medalists in last Olympics (those coaches are from Russia).

Genuinely sad emotions will be experienced by those who perfectly remembers brain power houses of Moscow or Novosibirsk, who used to observe true intellectual giants at work. It will be sad for those people because they understand that with every young "sprout" going overseas probability of Renaissance for Russian science is fading away as steam from breathing in a frosty day. And those people in their bitterness may start blaming different things for that, from collapse of Soviet Union to pandemic corruption.

Experts will be debating about rights and wrongs of that particular manifestation of so universally uneasy phenomenon as globalization. Rest of us should hope that Bing will get better.

Distortion

I was listening a podcast today about biblically old topic of Internet security. A guy from Microsoft for about an hour talked on firewalls, account privileges, encryption and other closely related issues. I would not call the whole theme overly exciting but certain facts were interesting nevertheless. Apparently, companies are distorting their security budgets so grotesquely that unusually primitive methods can be employed by hackers to get valuable data.

So much money are being poured into firewalls development and maintenance that other aspects of keeping data safe are suffering big time. He gave a concrete example. Some grocery chain in BC (was not specified) lost a great deal of customers' credit card info to some smart villain. The chain had good network security but the computer with all data was located in unprotected area. So instead of spending time in front of laptop, hacker contracted some drug addict for amount of $400 to break in and steal hard drive. Operation was success and grocery chain faced unpleasant reality to deal with army of not too happy customers.

The bottom line in Internet security though is that it is simply impossible to eliminate security risk completely - it can only be mitigated to a point. The best strategy here is to appear fortified enough so villains would move to softer targets. It is almost evolutionary thinking, a type of hi-tech Darwinism - survival of the fittest in security sense in the wild environment of cyberspace. It is kind of weird but hackers are the main driving force of that evolution. They are pretty valuable in that regard when looking at the big picture. They ensure progress.

Also, Microsoft highly recommends not to invent your own cryptographic algorithms. At least not for production use (they don't mind if you do that for fun). They want you to use the developed ones on the market. It is hard to argue with that statement. There is so much heavy duty math behind commercial cryptography nowadays one can spend years to learn just that. Programming cryptography implementation can be pain in the butt. But what can you do? Security and ease of use are opposite polars of any software development project. To serve both is like riding bicycle while joggling - some of us manage to do that but for a vanishingly short period of time.

Beginning

Well, they say blogging is a serious undertaking. It requires dedication, consistency and, most of all, sheer energy. Individuals prone to depressions are not good bloggers by definition. At the same time blogger should be a creative person and truly creative people are almost always in some kind of crisis (it is also a tax season by the way). So, how to reconcile blogger's energy with blogger's mood swings? Honestly, I have no idea. As one overly optimistic individual told me ones, to test limits of possible one should push himself into impossible. With this newly opened blog I intend to do exactly that.

I will not be overloading this blog with details of my biography (nothing exciting there) or some poetic ruminations about my feelings when I see fresh snow atop of Golden Ears Mountain. I want this blog to be technical but technical humanely so readers who don't care much about difference between Web Spiders and Java Beans would find something interesting in here. Since I do programming chiefly for Internet proportion of material on Web and Spiders supposed to be bigger than any other one here. I am not sure it is possible though.

OK, let this blogging commence and pardon me for my English in advance.