Coffee, IT and music therapy
Fuzzmz
I am the guy behind this site, the voice beneath the text and the person who tracks the stats and replies to your comments. You can reach me at master [at] fuzz.me.uk (same email address for Google Talk).
Homepage: http://fuzz.me.uk
Jabber/GTalk: master@fuzz.me.uk
Posts by Fuzzmz
Life is like a box of chocolates…
Oct 23rd
Pretty, isn't it?
A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for.
Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You’re stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat.
Sure, once in a while, there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee. But they’re gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is…is an empty box, filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.
I am a bit too jaded at times, aren’t I?
Love and other psychotropics
Oct 16th
From time to time I remind myself of this blog and feel guilty for not writing more in it; the truth is that, between a busy and fun start of the year which continued through summer and doing most of my writing on Twitter, I haven’t had much to write to the world about.
But now I’m back in the UK and, as usual, I’m in that mushy feeling state of mind. My whole view of living in the UK for the better part of the year tended to oscillate between “I’m not really living anything behind so let’s go go go!” to “Is it really worth leaving?” over the years, mostly being in tight connection to whether I had a special someone and if she was coming with me or not.
As you can guess, now I’m in the latter of the two mind sets, which makes this post have some sort of context that was missing before.
Love is that pair of sneakers you just can’t part with; you’ve been through everything in them, shared the ground beneath your world at every step and even though they may now look old and battered and broken they’re an part of who you are. They represent you, they’ve “grown” with you and every dent, tear and spot represents a shared memory, a shared act.
Yes, I can also see that Romanian saying “a fi calcat in picioare” (“to be stepped on”) forming in your head after the whole shoe analogy and you know what, it’s a valid thought! Love always represents a gamble, you’re always taking a risk when you allow yourself to say those three words that can make or break a moment or more, but in the end it’s a risk that’s worth taking; sure, you can end up being used and abused and stepped on, but hey, it’s a learning experience, right? It’s a risk that needs taking towards being happy. Sure, there are people who are happy and content without love, but I’m not one of them.
Cory Doctorow asks an interesting question in Eastern Standard Tribe: “Would you rather be smart, or happy?” this being closely tied to one of the themes of the book which is betrayal: the main character, Art, is used and manipulated by his girlfriend for her own gain. Art is generally a smart person, but he lets his guard down when love gets in the way which ends with him locked up in an insane asylum (no, that’s not the end of the book, I won’t spoil it for you) – happiness, even though fleeting and maybe fake, leads to his almost destruction.
I think that this, smart versus happy, like almost everything in life is a balancing act; you’re high on your wire, the lights on you and the crowd holding their breath while you make your way across, well, life, trying not to fall – keep everything in balance and you’re good, healthy and possibly more successful, don’t and you fall to your doom (sorry, life rarely has safety nets).
You might think that everything I’ve written so far is a cliché, but you know what?
The biggest truths aren’t original. The truth is ketchup. It’s Jim Belushi. Its job isn’t to blow our minds. It’s to be within reach. - Jeff Winger
In the end though, every time I think about love I fall back to a thing I once read (and for the life and deep regret of me I can’t remember where):
Being in love, truly in love, means renouncing all possible lives except the one shared with the person you love.
Future Shorts One – The Afterthoughts
Feb 5th
In case you don’t know, Future Shorts is a worldwide event dedicated to screening good short films on one day in over 90 cities from around the world; the screening is usually accompanied by other multimedia elements including live music and rescores, performers and installations.
In fact, their motto is ONE event. One beat. ONE audience… ONE worldwide. which nicely fits the concept on which the event is built on.
Going back to the event at hand, this was the second global edition for 2011 but the first one here in Romania (as far as I know), and took place in the Artexpo hall in the Bucharest National Theater. The place was a nice choice as it provided enough space for the audience, even though the main room was split in two smaller ones, each with its own screen for better viewing and distribution of seats; the downside though was that the room was somewhat chilly, especially if you came unprepared and hoping for a cozy atmosphere. The audio and video quality were good overall, even though at times (especially during the last film, Goodbye Mr Chu) it was a bit too loud and thus noisy for my taste. More >
Code isn’t perfect
Jan 9th
I hate it when people bash programs because they have bugs; you know what, it’s hard as hell to write software and it’s impossible to write perfect code!
Heck, even the common Hello World! has issues. Let’s take for example:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
void main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("Hello World!\n");
}
Someone forgot to check their return values (the standard is int main and not void main), things aren’t localized, and it will randomly trap on exit on some platforms. And, it is as published 20 years ago in a typical C textbook.
And this is just a small sample, imagine a codebase of million lines of code.
A good read about secure coding practices is the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle; it’s entire purpose it to make code as secure as engineering practices know how to accomplish. You can download it from here.
A bit on math
Dec 24th
Here’s a little secret they don’t teach in school: there is no One True Mathematics. Math is nothing but a long series of if-then statements. All branches of math start from axioms which are completely arbitrary. Using different mathematical assumptions to model a real-life problem can prove more or less helpful; mathematical terminology can be used or abused; but axioms themselves can never be called true or wrong.
Over time, people have figured out which axioms are convenient for solving large classes of problems. This leads some to prove more & more corollaries under that system. More >
“I want to be a computer programmer”
Dec 13th
I love it when people talk about programming in general and throw coders in just one pot and let them slowly boil without having even a basic understanding on some concepts behind the whole writing code experience.
First of all I want to make a distinction between “computer programming” and “software engineering”: the former can write code while the latter can engineer it. The analogy I’d use to describe the scope is “construction worker vs. architect,” except in this case the construction worker is also white collar.
While a computer programmer can churn out lines of code one after another he doesn’t know concepts such as analysis of algorithms, Big O notation or even software profiling. You can at an extreme think of this guy as a code monkey.
There’s a priceless look some give when other start talking about the various frameworks and concepts they’re working with. (SOA? Web services? SOAP?)
I guess what I’m saying is that there are various levels of “programmer”, and you might want to consider what kind of programmer you’re interested in becoming. It’s a pretty broad category. More >
Why I chose .NET
Dec 11th
From time to time I run into a forum post or tweet in which someone asks what language is a good one to start programming. All replies usually make good points about a language or another – be it Python, Java, C# or what have you – when it comes to how easy the language is to learn, how concise or beginner friendly it is, but one element that I rarely see mentioned in language choice is developer communities.
When I was faced with choosing a language on which to concentrate I was in the exact situation as the people mentioned above. I made the decision to go with Microsoft/.NET and I think this has been one of the best moves I ever made. More >
The move
Dec 5th
As some may know I’m spending most of my year in the UK being a nice chap and doing all sorts of weird things, such as going to Uni (well, not this year) or working. Well, I’ve decided to take my work with me and go back home this year, so I guess it’s goodbye Britain, I’ll see you again in October!
This may seem like a dumb move at first: why in hell give up a cozy office, proper tea and the English lifestyle in favor of noisy, somewhat dirty and weird Romania?
The first thing that came to mind was the money I would save by working from home: cut out paying rent, transport, utilities and a major part of food and I look up at saving around £300 a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. This alone is an important enough reason in itself, but coupled with the rest that will follow will make the decision sound more rational.
Regarding my work, all of it is tied to a computer, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the PC from the office or my laptop; the truth is that most of the time I already code on my laptop even while at work because I want to have my environment just so and my tools already there and set up to my exact desires without having to go & get approval before installing a specific utility I’ll end up using only once. As for my coworkers, we already do 99% of our communication via internet (email, IM, VoIP) because we want and are required to have a paper trail, so that won’t change much in our interactions. I also work better when I’m alone as I’m able to focus better at the task at hand. More >
Super Meat Boy dev mode
Dec 4th
While waiting for the level editor for Super Meat Boy which will be released sometime in January next year we can still create and edit levels in the game using the developer mode.
To enable it -devmode needs to be added the the launch options of the game which then allows the user to use the editor by pressing F1; pressing F1 again exits the editor and places the player in the level level. More >
And again… and again… and again
Dec 3rd
Some of us are a weird bunch. We like running into obstacles time and time again, pushing forward no matter what the costs and no matter the risk of failure; we fall to the furthest depths just to climb up again, take the most foolish risks just for the thrill of the conquest and when things go to shit we take a sip of bitter failure, smile, and get right back on that unstable chair at the edge of the flaming pit.
Some say we never learn, or that we’re stubborn and stupid for making the seemingly same mistakes over and over, not seeing the small changes made in hope of a different result. They expect us to take new paths without realizing that a new path can be almost identical to the old one. But we do get better, we learn from our mistakes and each new step is an iteration, not a leap; despite everything we play it safe even though the appearances may defy that. And when we jump we’re miles away from where we’re expected to be, as it would matter to us what is expected by others. More >