It is much much more than an online dictionary. It does both simplified and traditional (which is what I study by virtue of being in Taiwan). It also integrates with Google translate but then breaks down the Chinese word list in a very clever manner so that it is much easier to understand the Chinese phrase. Did I mention it can even play you animations on how to properly write each character?  

Can't live without it!
Enjoy!
Dimitrios Staikos

What do I think?

Greeks have historically been smart people, but there is no way to tell if today they are smarter than the people of other countries. The real problem is that about 90% of Greeks believe they are much smarter than the rest of the Greeks (and the rest of the world).

Believing that you are smarter has no value unless you can prove it, by doing something smarter than average. And the easiest way is to outsmart someone else or even better outsmart the "system"!

I will define "systemically unstable behavior" as something that if the majority performs within a system then the whole system gets screwed, including the actor. Trying to outsmart others or the system is systemically unstable behavior with regards to society.

In a nutshell, that's what happened to Greece. The 90% did 'smart' things and thought they would get away with it, that others would pay the so called negative externalities.

So many times I had heard the answer "But Everybody Does it, I would be stupid if I don't do it too" as an excuse for something inappropriate somebody did. This thinking is built into the Greek DNA.

Can this mentality change?

I don't think so, it might be temporarily put aside, but it is really the curse of the modern Greeks.

Cheers,
Dimitrios Staikos

Oh I feel so happy whenever I solve yet another mystery in the wonderful ways that Windows works :-) So happy that I desperately need to blog about it :-P

Last year I bought a ThinkPad laptop with Windows Vista. Lately I was running out of disk space. It just had an 150GB drive, so I was running low. I bought a new drive and with lots of failed attempts and some magic utility finally managed to restore the original disk with its mystery Lenovo partitions into the new disk and have the laptop actually boot! Then I had an extra partition which I decided (I now I am adventurous...) to mount as a folder on my C: drive. Just to see how that will work.

Then I moved lots and lots of stuff to this mounted-partition and got around 40GB free space in the main partition. Plus another 100GB or so on the mounted partition, I thought I was good.

However... the free disk space of the main partition continued to drop and drop and drop without any apparent explanation. When it reached down to 2GB, I moved some other stuff and got it back to 10GB. Then drop and drop again and today I had only 1.5GB free on the main partition. That was a challenge that simply begged to be tackled!

The properties on C: would show that 146GB were in use. I downloaded WinDirStat which is a superb tool, let it do its math, and what do I see??? WinDirStat reports that the total data on the drive is 74GB!!! Now the plot thickens... What on earth occupies this extra 70GB? 50% of my hard drive???

The first thing I did is to do a chkdisk on c: and scan for errors and stuff. Maybe the old disk had several sectors marked as bad and this got 'copied' to the new drive. I know that it sounds kind of ludicrous, but to my surprise it gave me an added 3GB of disk space! Still lots of GB missing but at least I got a head start.

So now, I need to got back in time a little.

Although Lenovo provided it's own backup software in the package, it was pretty brain-dead in my opinion so I opted to use the Windows Backup. Now, the Windows Backup is pretty basic, but I needed not much more. A few months ago I scheduled the backup to run daily and store the data to a network drive. So far so good.

Windows has however this amazing thing called Volume Shadow Copy, which I will not bother to describe here in extent, but suffice it to say that it has to do with the System Restore Points, which allows you to go back to previous states of your machine! Luckily I never had to try that, but there is another pleasant side effect involved... You can rollback individual files! Did you know that? :-P

If you open up the standard properties page for a file (choose one that gets backed up) you get something like this:

Now if you do your backups regularly and click on the Previous Versions tab you might see something like this:

Oh yeah, you can actually pick up any of the previous versions and take a look at it or restore it to a new folder. I don't know about you, but I say "Super Wow"! It like having source control embedded into the file system.

But I have always been wondering where on earth is Windows storing all this data... And how to reclaim this space... So after doing a bit of necessary web searching, I noticed that if you open the properties page for a partition, there is a Disk Cleanup button:

Clicking this you get the option to cleanup your own mess or everybody's mess :-) However to get to where I am going you need to choose All Users:

Then you get a nice dialog while Windows checks your system:

When that is finished you get a dialog telling you about some things you can do to cleanup space:

Not anything earth-shaking but... there is a More Options button! Clicking it gets you this dialog:

BINGO! From here you can cleanup all restore points except for the last one and reclaim disk space.

How much did I get back by doing this? I really could not believe my eyes... I got back 60GB!!!

Ahhh, they say there is no such thing as a free lunch and this is the case here. So take care. If you back up your laptop (they usually have medium sized disks) too often, then remember to cleanup the System Restore Points every now and then ;-)

Have Fun!
Dimitrios Staikos

When I bought my latest workstation I decided it would pay off to spare no expense, while trying to stay out of the "Game Machine" zone. One of the things that I decided I should have was hard disk redundancy. Backups and source control are must of course, but if my workstation crashes my problem is not losing the data. My problem is making an identically optimized workstation. I need about a week to do that.

  Just think about it: Reinstall Windows with Service Packs and a gazillion updates, Office with its own updates, Visual Studios and service packs, SDKs, WDKs, .NET frameworks of several versions and SPs, tools, etc, the endless list makes me shiver only to think of it. I have better things to do than looking at progress bars that pretend to be progressing thanks to some nice visuals.

So when time came I did what I thought best. I got an Intel WX58P workstation motherboard with hardware RAID and installed 4 identical 1TB hard disks in RAID10 configuration. In fact I got some "Enterprise Class" hard disk from Western Digital, just to be on the safe side.  

Today was pay-back day. Just 8 months after purchase and one of the disks in the RAID crashed. Here is how it looks like from the Intel Matrix Storage Console (click for details):

It took my hardware provider BARTEK (hail to them too) about 6 hours to come to my office with a replacement disk but it was the horroriest time (if there is such a word) that I've had in months!!! What if the currently not mirrored disk also crashed??? Oh my... I lose everything...

I tried to do some reasoning but it wouldn't be of much help. What is the possibility of two enterprise class hard disks crashing withing a 7 hour window? And especially the right two disks! But the one had already crashed, so it's history! Now I had 3 disks... What was the possibility of one crashing, especially the right one crashing? Especially given that another one of the same class and lot had already crashed! It's history of course but it can be indicative of problems in the whole lot... Probabilities were always confusing me...

And poor me, I had strong reasons not to shutdown the machine for 7 hours... Now that I think of it, it was not that wise, I should have shutdown to reduce the probability of an additional crash, but now it's history too...

Anyway the disk was replaced in time, the RAID was restored and now I am a happy blogger telling you how great it feels to have RAID save your ass(ets).

Enjoy!

Dimitrios Staikos

Parkinson's law says that all work expands to fill all time available for its completion.

This has be proven statistically to be very true, so nobody can doubt it. However some of the consequences of this law often go unnoticed as the law's wording and meaning gets twisted and turned over to suit one's needs.

We all know that project estimation is akin to solving NP-complete problems. You only know the exact answer after you have finished all the work. There are many shortcuts around the problem, but the exact answer requires you do all the work, like in an NP-complete problem the exact answer can be found only by examining ALL combinations.

Now suppose you have a project to do, that *really* needs 5 calendar months to complete, working at the best of your abilities, no interruptions, etc. What Parkinson's law says is that if your manager gives you 6 months to complete it, then your work will 'somehow' expand and you will do 6 months instead of 5, still working at the best of your abilities. You might add a few extras here and there, some more performance testing, whatever, it doesn't matter what. The work will expand to 6 calendar months.

From your point of view, this extra month adds significant value to the end result. However from your manager's point of view it adds more COST than value. And your manager is trying to get everything done at both the absolutely minimum quality level acceptable by the client and at the absolutely minimum cost so that she can maximize profits for the company (and her fat bonus too).

But there are costs and costs. One cost your manager cares about is the actual grand total, but then there is another cost she cares about: unpaid overtime, or to put it diplomatically 'human capital utilization'.

The grand thinking of high-level managers is that when developers are working normal hours the company is losing money. It is clearly losing money because according to Parkinson's law it is clear that the developers are doing less actual work, expanding it to fill their day, up to 'normal working hours'.

If developers could be pushed to work 10 hours instead of 8 every day, then even though Parkinson's law still applies, they will get more work done every day. This means the company improves it's human capital utilization and thus saves costs.

Now let's get back to the project level. No one knows the time required, so the manager, the client and the development team negotiate and agree to an estimate. Let's say 12 months.

After 12 months the project is ready, up and running, and the development team is celebrating. The manager might be celebrating too, but at the back of her head one thing is clear. She overestimated the project and the project expanded to 12 months according to Parkinson's law. If it could be done in 12 months then it could easily be done in 11 months or even 10 months.

The manager clearly FAILED to minimize costs. The manager will now be perceived by her peers (and her boss) as being SOFT because she clearly didn't push the team hard enough.

The project succeeded but the manager FAILED!

Now comes the nice part... Suppose that a time traveler from the near future visited the manager at the negotiation phase and told her "You can do it in 11 months". The manager fancied this guess and in fact the project was successfully completed in 11 months. On Time again... Failure again... for our poor manager... If it was done in 11 months then it can clearly be done in 10, maybe even 9 months...

So you can now see the great corollary to Parkinson's law, which we could call "The Law of Late Projects":

Management will always try to make a project late.

This is usually done by choosing a very optimistic deadline or, if the project seems to run smoothly, by introducing more work, changing the requirements, changing key people, replacing experienced team members with rookies, etc. You name it. As soon as a project appears to be on track the manager starts to panic; She is losing money for the company; She appears soft; She must ACT.

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos