Andrew Bunner

Immigrants are the consummate risk takers

2010-02-16T04:30:54Z

An author on NPR was trying to explain why Israel has such a successful economy in spite of other adverse circumstances. His thesis in bullet-point form:

To have sustained economic growth, you need sustained productivity increases.
Improvements in technology have historically been the best way to increase productivity.
Innovation in technology most often comes from small companies, less than 500 people.
The type of people who start and join these companies are risk-takers.
Immigrants are risk-takers.
Israel is a nation of immigrants that continues to actively encourage immigration.
Israel has more start-ups per capita than anywhere else (1 start-up per 1,100 residents) and a healthy economy.

I think he's on to something and I'm afraid the United States is doing it wrong.

We let foreign students come here to study, but make it difficult for them to stay. Letting people contribute to the American economy should be easy.

I actually think the process should be easy whether the immigrant is smart or not. Immigrants want to work. And they might have really bright kids.

This concludes "ur doin it wrong part 1". In part 2 (if I remember) I'll explore water-use in agriculture and how Israel manages to cultivate dry sand.

Google Buzz

2010-02-11T05:45:45Z

I've been working on Google Buzz. It's a fun, light-weight way to communicate inside GMail.

Also: If you squint carefully, you can make out a familiar face in the screen shot at http://buzz.google.com :-)

"A new approach to China"

2010-01-12T23:16:55Z

A blog post from my employer: Google: New approach to China

I'm on YouTube as an extra in a "PubSubHubub" promotion video

2010-01-08T22:46:31Z

PubSubHubub" is a simple technology (a protocol really) for allowing real-time updates to flow from publishers to content consumers (like you). Besides getting fresh content to users faster, it's also vastly more bandwidth-efficient: helping to unclog the tubes!

Judging a book by its cover: Part II

2010-01-06T23:11:56Z

We find the old castle in Aqaba just after sunset. It being closed, we snap some photos from the outside and head down to the shore to look around. Walking away a Jordian youth runs after us yelling something in Arabic (maybe). He's got our camera case! ... From some hand-gesturing, we learn that he's deaf. We thank him for the camera case. He stands there smiling, nodding and signing. Not knowing what to do, Angela suggests I give him a dollar. Nope. He didn't want any money--just to give us the case back! Friendly guy.

Judging a book by its cover: Part I

2010-01-03T14:47:57Z

Wandering the streets of Aqaba looking for the old castle, we're approached by three Arab men. Beards, head-scarves, etc. We prepare to fend them off with a "No, I don't need a guide" but before I can wave them away one of them asks, "Pardon me, but can you tell us the way to the beach?" ... Turns out they were from Germany!

Diving in Aqaba

2009-12-31T20:10:44Z

The dives are easy shoe dives here. Except that Angela and I have forgotten basically everything you need to know to dive on your own.

Being spoiled by Western dive shops where they do everything but breathe for you has left us soft and forgetful. When the dive master asked me to put my gear together I blanked, tried to "figure it out" and ended up doing it backwards, low, wrong and wrong. Angela was a lot closer, but when he asked us to do our buddy checks we just looked at each other. "Um... buckles? Air? Done? ..."

We managed to survive, but it was a heavy, long walk both in and out of the water. Putting on fins in the water is much harder than our dive master made it look. Easily five minutes of struggle.

Highlights from the dive part of the diving...

* Angela saw a big sea worm

* Some neat jelly fish

* An Octopus! Our first one that we've seen on a dive. Our dive master poked him out and he "swam" a bit

* Lots of small eels

* A very colorful nudibranch!

* Lion fish

* Many stone fish (if these hadn't been pointed out, we never would've seen them. They don't even move when you provoke them. Come to think of it... I'm not sure all of them were fish...)

* Gigantic beautiful green cabbage color. Twelve feet wide... enormous big head of cabbage!

* Very pretty school of baby fish. At first I though they were bubbles they were so small

Bonus: free Turkish coffee included before and after the dive. Delicious!

Photos from Israel and Jordan

2009-12-31T20:03:36Z

Angela worked on the captions during our day-long plane ride back.

Click through for the album on Picasa

Aqaba: Mexico of the Middle East

2009-12-29T14:51:43Z

In Aqaba you can't walk twenty feet without being invited to come into a shop or have a ride on a camel or buy some perfume or have a seat at a restaurant. Whatever it is they're selling, they do it enthusiastically. Walking down one street there were two shwerma places side by side each with a young Arab man telling us (simultaneously) all the things inside: "juices!" "we have meats" "falafel" "come in, I bring you tea!"

Favorite sound-bite... coming down an alley lined with street vendors selling shoes and souvenirs Angela says "Wow. That's a lot of shoes." A tired Jordian youth on a stool says "Welcome to shoes." Imagine the way a 16-year old American at Pizza Hut would greet a family of ten at the end of his shift. Same tone. Classic.

Israel "Vacation" Notes

2009-12-24T06:53:42Z

Angela and I have been in Israel the past couple weeks. Mostly for my work, but we're squeezing in some sights. A few notes...

We went to the Western Wall in Jerusalem last Friday afternoon. We read later that there was a near-violent demonstration there that same morning between pretty-orthodox Jewish women and more-orthodox Jewish men. Something about whether women should be able to wear a particular kind of scarf near the wall. (I'm not making this up)
Cesearea is a Roman city that became a Christian city that became a Muslim city and on and on. The Romans (Herod the Great) built an protected harbor by sinking barges full of volcanic ash that became a solid base where they could drive pilons. Fascinating engineering. You can climb all over the ruins there. Not that you should. On the other hand, they built a coffee shop into the ruins of a 2,000 year old wall so... what the heck.
We also visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. This is where different sects of Christianity fight with each other for control of this one building. Actual priest fist fights have broken out there.
Things shut down here Friday at 6pm. Like you can't get hot food kind of shut down. And the some of the elevators stop working.
We found FroYo in Haifa. Delicious. In Israel, it's all about the toppings. The guy behind the counter enjoyed telling us the English names for all 20-something of the toppings. Six or seven sauce possibilities (including something called "whisky sauce") and two types of melted chocolate.
Cafe Louise has the best food in Haifa that we've had.
Tel-Aviv has the awesomest play-ground. We played around, climbed, swung and got dizzy. At least as good as the rich-kids play-ground we found in Maui. (fewer bridges and towers, but more ropes and swings)

The big news items in Israel are things like:

Should Israel do a prisoner exchange (1,000 Palestianians for one captured IDF soldier)
Some orthodox school has segregated girls of one Jewish dominations from the rest of the school and is under scrutiny
Egypt is building an under-ground wall around their side of the Gaza strip
The king of Jordan just dissolved the legislature over there. He says he wants to reign in spending and bring some fiscal responsibility to the state and the legislature is getting in the way. We're going to Jordan tomorrow.
Israel is worst (or second-worst) in the developed world on some high school aptitude tests. There's a growing gap between the knows and the know-nots here that people are worried about. Makes me feel better about the U.S. Bad news for the Israelis is that they didn't have any kids who are in the ultra-orthodox religious schools take the test so the results are actually skewed upwards.

We were lucky to come on this trip with one of my co-workers who has an exception knowledge of 2000-years-ago history. So we learned a lot about the various plagues, sieges, murders and conquests of the area.

Back to work... last day at the office...

Endorsement for tektonic VPS

2009-11-27T14:04:43Z

There was a recent break-in at Media Temple and it came out that this company had been storing customer passwords in clear-text. I went to tektonic.net and asked a customer service rep (who are available via chat 24/7) how their passwords are stored. "We store no passwords as plain text on any of our servers or on your virtual host". -phew-

In my experience, I've always been able to get a sysadmin-savvy person on chat in just a minute or so. Plus they're super-cheap.

Cosmic ray detection by atmospheric fluorescence

2009-11-26T13:39:40Z

My dad's 1964 thesis is online and findable thanks to Google Scholar. He brought out a bond-paper hard-copy for us yesterday evening. Really fun looking back at his work and marveling at the state of the art 45 years ago. The circuit diagrams have vacuum tubes, the equations are carefully done with pen and ruler. And the science is still pretty cool.

Starting a new #hashtag meme

2009-11-22T21:12:07Z

Today I debugged some serialization Javascript that talks to my server. #WeWillLookBackOnThisAsTheDarkAgesOfFrontEndWebDevelopment

I think it has legs.

Java compiler compilers: SableCC 4 vs. Antlr 3

2009-11-16T14:48:38Z

This weekend I decided I wanted a custom JSON serialization scheme for Thrift objects. ("Thrift" is a serialization format and code generation tool; like Google Protocol Buffers, but without the builder-pattern overboard-ness).

So I wrote a tool to parse a .thrift files and churn out specialized JSON serialization and deserialization code for those Thrift objects.

Antlr

Antlr-3 has tons and tons of users and lots of documentation... but most of the docs seem to refer to Antlr-2. It took me a long time to figure out how to build a parse tree and walk it (you have to pass Antlr-3 the debug flag so that emits events about nodes it's visiting and then use the ParseTreeBuilder class). I thought there might be some way to transform the productions into a semantic-looking tree via Antlr's "tree" grammar, but I couldn't figure it out.

SableCC

SableCC-4 has much less documentation. The best documentation was an example grammar file in the source checkout. But once I started generating the compiler... everything was easy. To walk the tree, I just override generated methods like "in_ThriftFieldDefinition" and "out_ThriftStruct". Super-easy.

I figured out everything I needed to know in fifteen minutes by looking at the --help output of the tool, the generated code and one example file.

Conclusion

If you're not a compiler compiler expert or don't know exactly what "AST transforms" are, I suggest SableCC. In two hours I finished my tool that I wasted four hours trying to get working in Antlr.

Footnote

Someone will probably modify the Thrift compiler to produce the code I want in a few months (which is the right way to approach a problem like this). The two reasons I didn't go that route was... I'm so much faster in Java than C++ and I found a thread from someone who tried to do just that (for purposes of integrating Thrift with GWT) and gave up.

Review of Motorola DROID

2009-11-14T15:50:31Z

I'm carrying a super-computer from 1990 in my pocket and it's awesome. By transistor count, that might be an exaggeration or an understatement. Measured in units of awesome, it's no exaggeration.

This phone has a larger screen (by pixel count) than my first desktop computer. It's 100-1000x faster. It can take pictures at higher resolution than spy satellites that were launched when I was in high-school (not actually true).

I've been catapulted into the future.

I have a few minor nits:

- No lasers

- Camera does not take 3D images

- I'd like keys to be slightly more raised

- Can't drive my car remotely from phone

Other than that, five stars.