My Talk at MSLUG

On January 17th, I'll be giving a talk about my adventures in open source Erlang at the Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group (MSLUG) meeting. For more information, visit http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug.

I hear the members of this group have a strong interest in Erlang. Guillaume Germain, who wrote Termite, an implementation of Erlang style concurrency for Gambit-C Scheme, is a member, and so is Marc Feeley, the author of Gamit-C. I'm looking forward for my second opportunity to be surrounded by people who are interested in Erlang :)

This meeting is open to everyone, so if you're interested in attending, you're more than welcome.

Aside: I lived in Montreal for a year when I was 15. My last visit was about 5 years ago, so It'll be nice to visit again. It's been a while since I've had some good poutine! :)

New Year's Brain Teaser

Here's a good brain teaser to give you some entertainment for the new year.

You have 12 balls, identical in every way except that one of them has a different weight from all the others. You also have a balance scale. In 3 rounds, in each of which you can compare the weights of any 2 groups of balls, you have to ascertain which is the ball with the different weight and whether this ball is heavier or lighter than the other balls.

This is not a trick question in any way. I solved part of this puzzle after I got a significant hint. I wish I had tried a bit harder to solve it by myself, but it's too late now. If you want a hint, you can email me, but you'll feel greater satisfaction if you solve it by yourself.

Happy new year!

New ErlyWeb Google Group

Following the suggestion of one of my readers, I created a Google group for ErlyWeb hackers. You can join it to ask questions, share points of view, help each other out, make suggestions, and announce the launch of the killer ErlyWeb app you're building :)

Here's the link: http://groups.google.com/group/erlyweb

From now on, I will make all announcements about new releases in this group rather than on my blog.

The Correction

If you have finance background (one of my majors was Economics, the others were Math and Computer Science -- but I liked Math the most, especially probability theory), you should know that markets often price equities irrationally. That's due to the crowd mentality that tends to possess investors: instead of buying the bargain stocks that other investors overlook and that give great returns in the long run, they chase the hyped stocks that get all the news coverage, only to eventually see their prices crash and burn.

Although such bubbles happen periodically, they are always followed by a correction: the market wakes up and realizes that it placed incorrect values on certain stocks, leading to the nose-dive of their prices, whereas other stocks rise from obscurity as investors realize what great values they are.

I think we're finally starting to see a correction in the more interesting field (at least, to me) of programming languages :)

New ErlyWeb Zip file

I created a zip file containing ErlyWeb 0.1 and its libraries for easy installation. Check out erlyweb.org for more info.

Going to the Erlang Conference

I'm not exactly enjoying what one would call a "positive" cash flow these days, but I decided to dig into my hard earned budget anyway and spend a chunk of it on a trip to Sweden for the 12th annual Erlang conference.

Here's my dilemma: I want to take this opportunity to make a 2 week backpacking trip in Europe. I want to see Sweden, but I'm afraid it will be too cold to enjoy in the winter. I can either stay in Sweden after the conference, or hop on a plane to France or Spain (I *really* want to visit Barcelona).

I'd appreciate it if anyone could give me some tips on what I should do.

To save money, and also to stay true to the spirit of backpacking, I'll be staying in hostels, which means I probably won't bring my MacBook. I hope that spending 2 weeks without a computer won't result in serious withdrawal symptoms.

Today's Innovation Prize Goes To...

the City of Boston -- for its solar-powered trash compactors!



I must praise this compactor for its fault tolerant design: even if the power grid fails, it keeps compacting away. Very Erlangy :)

(Alas, if the sun fails, it is in trouble -- but then we'd have bigger problems to worry about :) )

Going to the Paul Graham Talk

After weeks of bombarding me with tedious Erlang hype, reddit has finally given me a useful link: Paul Graham (whom I've been accused of over-quoting :) ), will be speaking tomorrow at MIT. (For literal minded people -- I didn't mean the first part of that sentence seriously :) ) It's a free talk that's open to the public.

Is anybody who reads this blog going?

Where Are My Readers From?

Here's a geo map overlay view taken from Google Analytics for my blog's last 500 visits.

As you can see, Erlang isn't just popular in Sweden :)

Ranked by number of visitors, the top 10 countries are USA (1312 visits), UK (188 visits), Germany (151 visits), Canada (135 visits), China (120 visits), Sweden (106 visits), france (94 visits), Australia (81 visits), Brazil (75 visits) and Netherlands (63 visits).

Where are you from?

Update: I made the high-res map downloadable.

Museum of Natural History

Dear readers,

I'd like to take a short break from my Erlang postings and share a few pictures I took on my trip earlier today to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Note: I did some retouching with GIMP (actually, GimpShop for OS X) to enhance the dynamic range of these images, as the originals suffered from faded colors due to the poor lighting conditions.

A Velociraptor

A green lizard

This dino must have been coding in Java. Its neck looks like this stack trace :)

A chameleon

You can view the rest of the set here

Who's Going To The Erlang Workshop?

Hi,

I'm curious as to who's planning on going to the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop in Portlang on the 16th (the link is on the front page of http://erlang.org).

I haven't made up my mind yet if I should go. It would be fun to meet some Erlangers face to face but I have no idea how popular this workshop is.

I'd appreciate it if somebody could clue me in.

Thanks in advance!

How A Nigerian Scammer Tried to Rip Me Off on Ebay

In this posting, which I wrote right after I posted my first Ebay auction to sell an old laptop, I jokingly alluded to the drama that would take place surrounding my auction. I never expected any real drama to actually take place, but lo and behold, it did -- in the form of a Nigerian scammer trying to steal my laptop. Here's the rest of this strange story.

Less than a day after I posted my old Compaq Laptop on Ebay for sale, and a week before the auction was to end, a person by the name of Richard Hudson, with the email address of bravecolonel22@yahoo.com, bought the laptop with the Buy It Now option. He then sent me the following message:

Hi Yariv,
Season's Greetings to you.I am Richard Hudson from Pocahontas,Arkansas,US.I'm contacting you concerning your item on Ebay which i eventually became the winning bidder for your item.Morever i'm presently serving our beloved nation here in Iraq with the United Nation and i intend sending this item to my wife who works with the American Embassy in Nigeria as a visa Officer.You shouldn't worry about the shipping fees to her okay?.I'll take care of it with my Personal FedEx Account # after payment so you won't need to pay any money when mailing it to her over there.I will be making my payment to you via PayPal,So get the package ready for immediate or next day shipment okay.Make sure you send me your PayPal Email Address so i can immediately make out my payment to you for this item purchase.You are to mail it out immediately you get the confirmation mail from PayPal.Mail me back it's urgent.


Regards.
Richard.

It doesn't take a genius to smell something fishy here. If the bad grammar and punctuation don't give it away, the word "Nigeria" certainly raises alarm bells for anybody who has heard about the plague of Nigerian 419 scams on the internet. If you haven't heard about them, I suggest you Google for "nigerian scam" and you'll find plenty of information on this bizarre and disgusting phenomenon.

Fortunately, my scam radar was alert, partly because I had recently read the New Yorker article "The Perfect Mark" about this same subject. The article tells the story of a psychotherapist -- an upstanding citizen by most standards -- who has been suckered by a Nigerian scammer into sending most of his savings to Nigeria with the hopes of making a large return from a convoluted business scheme that was -- guess what? -- entirely fabricated.

It's actually a very sad story because this scam ruined the psychotherapist's life and ended up putting him in jail. However, you can't feel too much sympathy for this guy because his misfortune is partly due to his own fault.

Going back to my story -- at this point, I was quite certain I was dealing with a Nigerian scammer, but I played along because I was curious as to what his next step would be. I told him to PayPal me the money and I'd ship him the laptop. (I didn't realize when posting the auction that Ebay allows you to enforce immediate payment by PayPal for Buy It Now sales. Because I didn't use this feature, the scammer was able to steal my auction using Buy It Now without putting any money down. It also showed the scammer I was a new seller who obviously wasn't versed in defensive tactics for Ebay sellers.)

Here's the scammer's reply:

Hi Yariv,


I have made out my payment to you for this item purchase and the exact amount of
what i bought from you has been deducted from my account,So check your mail for
the confirmation mail from paypal.Get the Package ready for immediate Shipment.You are to take the Package to any FedEx Location close to you for drop off.Paste the
information below on the package and make sure you fill the international airway bill
form correctly with the information below.Then do me a favour by putting the item
worth as $300.00 so as to reduce customs charges against her when receiving it over
there.Ship it via international priority.Then a tracking number will be giving you which
you will then send to paypal at pay-pal.com@consultant.com and your account will be credited with the exact amount of what i bought from you immediately.Hope to hear
from you when you have it maild out today.Have a nice working week ahead.


FedEx Account Number :- 170083695
NAME:- RICHARD A.ESTHER
ADDRESS:- 17B ADESHINA STREET
CITY:- IKEJA
STATE:- LAGOS
COUNTRY:-NIGERIA
ZIP-CODE:-23401
PHONE:-08034852880


Sincerely
Richard.

There are too many flaws and red flags in this email for me to go through all of them, but the fact that Richard's "wife" is named "Richard A. Esther" makes it blatantly obvious that not only is this a total scam, but also that the scammer isn't very bright.

The Nigerian scammer expected me to ship him the laptop without first making sure the payment has cleared. He thought he could trick me into thinking that PayPal would only forward me the money after I send PayPal the tracking number of the actual shipment at the very legitimate-sounding email address "pay-pal.com@consultant.com". Riiiight....

A quick search on Google for "paypal.com@consultant.com" landed me on another guy's blog who suffered from a similar scam. (That link is dead now, but I did find another link to this Ebay forum posting, where another person tells a very similar story.) I replied to the scammer telling him that our communications are over, but if he ever gets bored while bravely serving the country, he should read the blog posting I found as well as the New Yorker article I mentioned above.

I contacted Ebay and told them what happened, and after a couple of days, they sent a long and detailed reply telling me what I should do to get reimbursed for the auction and describing what steps I can take to protect myself in the future. I think Ebay has actually handled this incident pretty well, and I can't blame Ebay entirely for what happened. There will always be online scams, and Ebay can't completely block it from their site. However, I think that Ebay should place more noticeable warnings for sellers regarding such scams on its website -- at the very least, next to the page where you can enable the Buy It Now option.

I think it's sad that somebody would invest so much mental energy into devising ways of ripping people off rather than making money in legitimate ways, of which there are many. But then again, the effort on the scammer's side may not be very high because he probably attempts the same scam on many potential victims. If he tricks a certain perentage of his victims into sending him relatively expensive items without paying for them, he can probably make a relatively good living, especially for his country.

Well, I hope that this posting raises your awareness and helps you avoid such scams on the internet if you ever come across one. Being informed will help you avoid these traps, just as the New Yorker article I had made it easier for me to recognize and avoid this particular scam.

Sometimes all the spam, viruses, scams, malware and other forms of digital filth that thrive online make the 'net feel like a lawless, dangerous, ugly place. But then again, all the horrible things that happen in the real world make the 'net seem almost clean in comparison.

Ebay, Here I Am

I used to think I was the only living, breathing person with an Internet connection who has never sold anything on Ebay.

Today, this has changed. I finally decided to take action and sell my Compaq laptop on Ebay. I got the new MacBook, with which I am more than happy, so instead of keeping that unused Compaq around I decided to try to place my trust in the free yet imperfect market mechanism to allocate my laptop to its most economically efficient place.

You can see the auction in all its glory here. I feel hopelessly amateurish compared to the other laptop sellers on Ebay, but I hope somebody likes the laptop, likes the price and trusts that I'm not a scumbag enough to buy it.

I know this technology-enabled seller meets buyer story is quite thrilling, so I'll keep you posted on how this high action drama plays out.

At 5th Ave Apple Store

What's the first thing you do when you're at the Apple store on 5th ave?



Collect evidence :)

Hello World

I decided to catch up with the times and start a blog about programming, technology, philosophical musings and basically anything that comes to mind. I have learned so much -- especially about programming -- from reading other people's blogs, so I wanted to give something back by sharing some of my knowledge with the rest of the world.
Plus, I've recently grown quite concerned with the shortage of time-wasting distractions made available to members of the modern workforce by the severely underutilized technology called the World Wide Web, so I decided I'll have to do my part to mitigate the situation by providing a worthwhile destination for my faithful readers as they stare at their browsers' hopelessly blank address bars contemplating whether Solitaire is about to make a comeback in their lives.

Enjoy.

This is me, at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, with Alcatraz in the background: