Bruce Schneier has written yet another spectacularly lucid piece on why the the FBI shouldn’t be able to force technology vendors in the USA to add back-doors to their products.

The current proposal which is probably going to get the backing of the Obama administration, will levy fines of $25,000 per day on technology vendors that don’t add back-doors to their systems to allow government monitoring.

Schneier argues that history has shown that those back-doors are inevitably used by criminals and foreign governments with ill intent and leave people, the vast majority of whom aren’t criminals, less secure and less free.

Go now to Tesla.com and listen to Elon Musk’s portion of the shareholder meeting that occurred today from minute 49:00.

It’s probably the best insight you’ll get into how entrenched the USA is on traditional cars and traditional sales channels. It’ll also explain why you consistently have a crap experience buying cars in the USA and why servicing your car costs so much.

Musk gets emotional and my sense is that he is emotionally invested in his company and has big dreams that are being blocked effectively by industry incumbents.

I just became a Tesla fan.

Update: HM’s Director of Comms was kind enough to post a response here (see below in comments), Elmarie responded in the comments, today the issue was resolved when the owner of the HM distributer in South Africa called Elmarie and apologized for the way things were handled and it sounds like they’ll be working together on getting a few more Aerons for the office. Nice to see a brand that has their ear to the ground and responds to consumer feedback within 24 hours.

My good friend Elmarie ordered her first Herman Miller Aeron chair for her office. She responded to an ad placed in Gumtree by “All Office” who are the exclusive Herman Miller agents in South Africa.

She was pretty excited when her Herman Miller Aeron Chair arrived, as were we all, but it turns out the price she was charged was not the advertised R6995 (approx $765.50) but instead she was charged R7974.30 (approx $872.68), over $100 more.

She called “All Office” slightly irate and was told the price she was quoted was excluding VAT (South African sales tax). For my American friends/family and anyone in a non-VAT country, one of the first principles of the South African VAT act is that you include the tax in the price.

What really soured this experience was the following: When chatting to a manager at “All Office” Elmarie was told that if she doesn’t want to be a “good citizen” and pay the full price, then he would take the balance out of the salary of the sales person who placed the Gumtree ad.

So after hearing ads for the Herman Miller Aeron chair by Sit4Less on National Public Radio for the last year in the States – and thinking we’d get a few for our office in the USA, I’ve pretty much done an about-face on the brand and won’t be buying any Aeron’s any time soon.

PS: I’d like to hear from Herman Miller in Germany about this. Elmarie has emailed them and is waiting to hear back.

The Valley has taken some criticism for massively incentivizing the smartest people in the world to work on problems that won’t really benefit our species – like how to get more ad clicks. But that’s not what really bugs me.

What really bugs me is that in SV, nothing is built to last. Everything is built for an exit.

Imagine a party and a room full of silicon valley entrepreneurs. You are a new entrepreneur to the area and you want to meet the guy who is everything you want to be. Go on. Admit it. It’s that guy in the corner surrounded by people, who arrived 2 years ago, started his company 18 months ago and just sold it to Google for $20 to $50 million and now works for them. That’s the guy everyone wants to talk to because they want to be that guy. That is the epitome of SV success. And it is a massively destructive culture.

SV is attracting the worlds most talented engineers and tech business people. The founders, staff and investors of these companies hope that these folks will build a product for 18 months to 3 years, have the company acquired by a large incumbent and have the product killed within 2 years. Only the team remains as employees for the acquirer.

The dominant business model in SV is not innovation and entrepreneurship but recruitment. And if you arrive in SV and are hoping to build to get acquired, you are really an aspiring recruiter. Your strategy is to assemble a team, find a project that is intellectually interesting enough to them to keep them all in one place for 1.5 to 3 years, and have them demonstrate their talents to a large tech incumbent who is hiring. When the hiring event occurs, the incumbent will acquire the company for somewhere between $1 and $4 million per engineer. The deal will be cash for investors and an earn-out for founders, both of these being the equivalent of recruiting fees.

What makes me sad about this is that many real and talented entrepreneurs who could be building innovation and job creation machines are caught up in this. They are mentored into thinking this is the way things are done and their potentially world-changing businesses are eaten by the system.

Most of the rest of the world has a wonderful natural selection system for defining business success. Good, healthy successful businesses generate cash and lots of it. They create jobs, make people profoundly happy and satisfied and create new products and services that improve lives. They grow organically with their customers as they develop a pattern of making people happy.

Silicon Valley is a wonderful place to raise investment capital for a technology business. My investors are amazing individuals and have empowered us tremendously as entrepreneurs. But basing a business in The Valley feels to me like clearly stating your intent to exit and not build. And I think every entrepreneur’s intent should be to build and not exit.

Push 100,000 elements onto a PHP array() where each element is a four element associative array (a hash in Perl speak). Here’s the data being pushed:

array(
  'owner' => 100,
  'host' => 'www.example.com.co.uk',
  'path' => '/this/is/an/example/path.html',
  'hostkey' => '1111'
)

The memory grows by over 80 megabytes.

Pushing takes less than a second or two but shifting off the first 1000 elements takes over 17 seconds on my machine.

Now take that same data and create a basic FIFO class that has push() and shift() methods. Use pack() and unpack() to store the data in a long string. Total time to push 100,000 and shift the first 1000 elements is around 1 second. Total memory is 7 megabytes which is less than 10% of PHP’s internal array()’s consumption.

PHP’s splFixedArray class which is advertised as mainly having a speed advantage doesn’t fair much better. With a fixed array created of 100,000 elements and loading and unloading the same associative array() it grows by 75 megs but is very fast at half a second. Just for fun I pushed 100,000 elements on an splFixedArray which are simply the values of the test associative array concatenated into a string and it’s still weighs in at 13 megabytes.

Here’s the FIFO class:

class wfArray {
        private $data = "";
        private $shiftPtr = 0;
        public function __construct($keys){
                $this->keys = $keys;
        }
        public function push($val){ //associative array with keys that match those given to constructor
                foreach($this->keys as $key){
                        $this->data .= pack('N', strlen($val[$key])) . $val[$key];
                }
        }
        public function shift(){
                $arr = array();
                if(strlen($this->data) < 1){ return null; }
                foreach($this->keys as $key){
                        $len = unpack('N', substr($this->data, $this->shiftPtr, 4));
                        $len = $len[1];
                        $arr[$key] = substr($this->data, $this->shiftPtr + 4, $len);
                        $this->shiftPtr += 4 + $len;
                }
                return $arr;
        }
}

Here’s the test script using the FIFO class with the array() tests commented out.

require_once('wfArray.php');
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$p1 = memory_get_peak_usage();
$stime = microtime(true);
//$arr = array();
$arr = new wfArray(array('owner', 'host', 'path', 'hostkey'));
for($i = 0; $i < 100000; $i++){
        //array_push($arr, array(
        $arr->push(array(
                'owner' => 100,
                'host' => 'www.example.com.co.uk',
                'path' => '/this/is/an/example/path.html',
                'hostkey' => '1111'
                ));
        if($i % 1000 == 0){ echo $i . "\n"; }
}
$i = 0;
while($elem = $arr->shift()){
//while($elem = array_shift($arr)){
        $i++;
        if($i > 1000){ break; }
        if(! ($elem['owner'] == 100 && $elem['host'] == 'www.example.com.co.uk' && $elem['path'] == '/this/is/an/example/path.html' && $elem['hostkey'] == '1111')){
                die("Problem");
        }
}
echo "\nTotal time: " . sprintf('%.3f', microtime(true) - $stime) . "\n";
$p2 = memory_get_peak_usage();
echo "Grew: " . ($p2 - $p1) . "\n";

Spain has been all over the press this weekend with a 100 Billion euro bailout agreed to by   Eurozone finance ministers. I spent the last three days in Spain and I find the coverage I’m reading somewhat disconnected with reality.

I drove down to Madrid from where I live in Southern France and spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning there, then drove back home and spent Saturday evening in Pamplona where the San Fermin festival starts in a month with the running of the bulls.

Madrid is a shining jewel in Europe. The city is immaculately clean and has a wonderful mix of new buildings like the Cuatro Torres that make for a spectacular modern skyline juxtaposed against gorgeous old buildings like the Royal Palace.

Walking in the Parque del Oeste where the Egyptian temple of Debod was moved to save it from the Aswan Dam, the park is filled with locals who have come out at night for their evening walk. Kids playing, groups of older women or men walking together, lovers in a quiet secluded spot in the park. Everyone is happy and full of life.

Driving around Spain there is an incredible amount of active road construction and the roads that aren’t being worked on are in great condition with many spectacular bridges.

Pamplona was absolutely heaving with party-goers on Saturday night including a huge Spanish rock festival, packed bars and pubs and streets literally filled from wall to wall in the older part of town – and the newer part was full of locals out for their evening walk. I visited a heavy metal bar with an Iron Maiden cover band doing a terrible rendition of Maiden’s older stuff and the standing-room-only crowd loving every second of it.

While in Madrid I got chatting to a local shopkeeper and went out on a limb and asked her about the informal or under-the-table economy in Spain. She explained that many people are employed off the books. I asked why, speculating that the tax in Spain is very high. She explained yes that’s one reason, but taxes are higher in Italy where she’s originally from. Another reason is to keep getting social benefits like a housing benefit. She also said it’s popular to pay someone only 70% of what they’re really paid into their bank account and the rest in cash to avoid tax.

More evidence that there’s a thriving off-the-books economy is that when we stayed in Madrid, we rented self catering accommodation. The proprietor asked that we pay the roughly 200 euros bill in cash.

All the economic indicators used to describe the “Spanish crisis” and provide rationales for bailing out spain or to predict how bad the “coming collapse” will be don’t take the informal economy into account. It also makes it difficult to understand the needs of the Spanish people, what the GDP really is, how dependent they really are on social programs and what Spain’s real ability is to service it’s debt.

To some the informal economy in Spain may seem to be immoral because conventional wisdom holds that one should “pay your taxes” and put your money in a safe place like a bank. But the Spanish people seem to be discovering a way to live without banks and government visibility on how much they earn or what they do with their money. I suspect many of the government assistance programs are over subscribed and do little to serve their intended targets.

It makes one wonder who the Eurozone is really bailing out.

“Everyone has a plan until they get hit.”

~Mike Tyson.

Studying French for 1.5 months and then arriving in France thinking I’m a badass knowing how to sling a few sentences together was a notion rudely trussed, cooked, carved up and served back to me on a giant silver platter called humility by a certain French checkout girl yesterday at Decathlon.

I’d already been to the Bordeaux Apple Store (which is awesome), Animal’s World for pet supplies (also awesome), Orange and Ikea and flattered by people taking my money into thinking that I’m doing OK. Standing at the back of the line at Decathlon at the end of the day a checkout girl hurls a handful of words at me and waits while the entire line turns around and stares at me. I completely froze and couldn’t utter a word of french. I leaned over and in squeaky english said “I don’t speak french” and wanted to die. She gesticulated wildly at the line next to me and I walked over there and she stopped gesticulating. I still have no idea what she said.

I started today screwing up my first verb “parlez” instead of “je parle” after I was sure I’d at least get that right. Learning French and actually speaking it is like going from boxerobics to Mike Tyson swinging at your head.