Melih’s Thoughts

One day, mutual friendship will be unnecessary as mutual decency will be the standard norm, and humanity will emerge as our greatest asset.

I’ve been in California for two months now. It’s amazing how quickly that time has passed. I started a new job, moved to a new city, bought new furniture (ended up building it all!), made new friends, and the list seems to go on and on and on.

I only realized how much time had gone by when I called my younger brother, and realized that he was already moved back into his dorm, and getting ready for his sophomore year in college. It’s bizarre to me how I used to have such a rigid schedule - fall semester, spring semester, internship, repeat - for so many years, and in the blink of an eye, it all changes. But I think that’s what makes it that much more exciting. In 2 months, we have released our AIR app, added a public feed system, and really started to lay down a foundation for our future. It helps that we got an additional round of funding, and brought Bain Capital on board. I’ve also learned so much about all the wrong ways that I was doing things. My biggest lesson learned:

It’s always worth doing it the right way first regardless of the marginal costs you will pay to set it up and get things working. Doing it otherwise will always cost more in the long run. Too often the allure of short term optimization leads to long term inefficiency.

I think the next period of time, whether it be a few months or the next year, is going to see me really grow up as a developer, and hopefully as a person as well.

On that front, I’ve really found myself going back to the fundamentals. I’m reading like I did when I was in middle school, and I play soccer in nearly all of the free time that I have. By exercising my mind and body, I’m confident that I will neither burn out nor become one-dimensional. Both are states that I fear I could easily fall into, but so far I think that I’ve taken the steps necessary to come out on the better end of that battle.

And so now I wait to see the future unfold, but don’t worry too much because standing around and watching isn’t something I plan on getting used to.

– Dinner, August 15

Well, I start real life on Monday by showing up for my first day at Tokbox. Some places that’s today, but here it’s still tomorrow. It’s amazing, exciting, nerve-racking, and humbling all at once.

Standing on the shoulders of giants gives one an amazing view, but it’s important that while I gaze at what has been that I maintain focus on what I will be. Someday my shoulders will support another generation of amazed, excited, nervous, and humbled individuals, but between now and then awaits immortality.

Here goes nothing…

This is from a posting on the Freakonomics blog. This is just way too funny.

My favorite story concerns my son Nicholas:

Relatively early on in the pregnancy we had an ultrasound. The
technician said that although it was very early, he thought he could
predict whether it would be a boy or a girl, if we wanted to know. We
said, “Yes, absolutely we want to know.” He told us he thought it would
be a boy, although he couldn’t be certain.

“How sure are you?” I asked

“I’m about 50-50,” he replied.

Don’t take that technician to Vegas. He’ll having you picking numbers at roulette, and playing the horn in craps.

On a scale of one to awesome, this is way past awesome. If you don’t get why, then consider enrolling in the Economics program at your local four-year institution.

Stronger from ticoneva on Vimeo.

– Dinner, February 23

It seems that you can’t claim that a project has started until there is a bug of some sort that has nothing to do with any code that you have written. In fact, it’s a bug in you setting up your system, which often tends to convince folks that the stars are lined against them, and they should just quit. Don’t quit. Just be patient, and you’ll find the way.

I will be building the visualization that I created for the MovieLens Recommendation System as my project in Visualization. It is probably the most awesome thing that I’ve planned on doing in a long, long time. To do the visualization, I will be taking advantage of an IMDB API written in Ruby by a one Stephen Becker IV. I need the API to pull out information from IMDB that isn’t available in the data that we are given in the text file.

And so today I am setting up the environment as a proof-of-concept, and I immediately run into a problem. Others seem to have had this problem, and seem to have solved it by waving their hands in the air and changing the magnetic field around themselves by just enough to switch the necessary bits on their hard drive. Unfortunately, I was never very good at waving my hand in the air like I just don’t care.

The problem was that an included extension wasn’t building properly, and therefore when it was called it was puking the following output:


monvural$ ruby imdb.rb
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — hpricot_scan (LoadError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `require’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6-jruby/lib/hpricot.rb:20
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `gem_original_require’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `require’ from imdb.rb:12


I thought to myself, “Well damn, there’s no way I’ll figure this out.” The solution however was quite trivial. Props must go to the blog aki note that had the answer written in Japanese. I used my amazing powers of reading the English characters to solve the issue at hand. The following steps will fix the error:


cd /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6/ext/hpricot_scan/
sudo ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

The result was a working program! The first major obstacle tackled, I can now get the information that I want from IMDB. Now I need to learn how to efficiently use Java3D.

Here is my cover letter to the world:

==========
You’re probably familiar with the kid who sits in class and makes comments like, “Java isn’t a real programming language, you can’t overload operators.”
Well that isn’t me.

You’re probably also familiar with the kid who answers all of the easy questions to make it look like they really know what they’re talking about, and then needs to sit in the TAs office to finish up simple programming assignments.
That’s not me either.

I’m the guy who finishes the mundane stuff early on so that I have more time to fiddle with my own projects. I have 3 or 4 start up ideas drawn on paper, and I’ve actually started building some of them, but what I’ve discovered is there’s really something lacking if you don’t have a group of like-minded individuals to share ideas and to tell you that something you’re doing is stupid or awesome equally. I think I’m searching for an environment like the one that you have created because I’m ready to figure out how to revolutionize an industry or an idea. I realize it’s just not something that you can do alone. I’m motivated by the reality that success isn’t random, and that it’s a combination of good people with good ideas. And I think my see it all, touch it all attitude makes me an asset to a small group who needs someone to do it all in the process of starting a revolution.
==========

I’ll be available in July, and my resume can be found here.

And then the whole issue is resolved… All I had to do was wait for Bugzilla 3.0.3 (I installed 3.0.2), and the whole issue with the DBI package would have been resolved. Now isn’t that a stinker.