Javia blog

UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) is basically the same thing as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). It is the zero-offset time zone.

As the world gets global, it gets confusing to use all the different timezones. It would be good to have a uniform system to name the time — and UTC is the best candidate.

UTC is already used by airplane pilots when they communicate time — because the planes travel often between timezones, and you don’t want some pilot or control tower to get confused in the time-zone names and time translation.

The local time system that is in use now has the advantage that the time (in the local time zone) corresponds to some degree to the sun position on the sky. In general you expect that 8:00am is in the morning (sunrise), and at 1:00am you expect that it’s dark.

The drawbacks of the local time system become appearent when people travel or communicate between timezones: a traveller has to adjust his watch when travelling, and continously make mental transformations to compute the time in the other time zone. Whatsmore, were there a single (unique) timezone, we could drop the timezone concept altogether, and only talk about time (or Earth time, when need comes).

Also the communication between people is now global — instant messenger, VOIP calls, skype etc. More and more people talk between timezones. It’s easy to see the babel scenario when co-workers use different time-zones each to name the time. For example:

A: What about having the meeting at 9:00 PDT?
B: Sorry, I have to leave at 18:00 CEST.
C: 18:00 EEDT works fine for me.
A: Ok, what about 8:00 PDT then?

Here is the plan for the global switch to UTC:

1. Eliminate Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time) in all time-zones (have a single time throughout the year in each timezone).
2. Merge close-by zones: Eastern Europe (EET, e.g. Romania) and Central Europe (CET, e.g. Germany) would adopt U.K. time (UTC); The United States would merge into a unique time zone (e.g. PST or EST). This should reduce the global number of time-zones to about half a dozen.
3. Start communicating the time both in the local timezone and in UTC (in order for the population to get used to UTC).
4. Abandon the remaining timezones, everybody adopts UTC only.

Of course, an ambitious endeavor, to unify the timezones. To put it in perspective, is it more difficult than the human flight to Mars? Or is it easier than the power-plug unification?

On the plus side, I think it would be enough for some major countries to adopt UTC (China, India, US, European Union, Russia, Japan) and the others will follow.

Among the first things I’ve been imprinted with at Google, is that Google is a very secretive company. I’m not allowed to tell almost anything about [the inside of] Google. I don’t even know how I could ever post anything mentioning the word Google on my public blog, but given that I’ve read public blogs of other googlers, I imagine that just blogging may not be a reason for immediate firing. Just for caution, I’ll try to restrict myself to saying only positive things about Google (and this does not imply that there are other-than-positive things to be said about Google) — self-censorship is an interesting attitude.

First, I should stress that there are plenty of great things about Google — the problem is that many of these are already well known (not to mention the food).

My first contact with the inside of Google was through the interviewing process (when I was recruited). I can tell that I was positively impressed by the interviewing process: most of the questions/tasks were relevant and challenging, and the people conducting the interviews seemed compentent and smart. I also had the impression that they were looking for objective hints in order to evaluate my skills (as oposed to subjective judgement). As a simple outline of the interviewing process, I started by sending my Resume (CV) by email to Google. After this followed two phone-screens, and afterwards, four in-person interviews.

What can I say, I’d wish to become as good an interviewer as some of the persons who interviewed me. But there is one small thing that keeps me from being completly extatic about the recruiting process at Google: about a year and a half ago, I sent for the first time my resume to Google. It was not exactly the same resume, and the layout was different, but it was essentially describing the same person (me).

Back then, I got back the standard refusal email, we have no oppenings matching your skills at this time or something like this, but I think that the real message of the email was: based on your resume, we decided it’s not worth proceeding to the phone-screen phase. Meaning that the recruiter was so confident that I’m a bad candidate, that it didn’t warrant a phone-screen test.

I don’t really believe that I improved that much between then and now. I rather think that I experienced a glimpse in the recruitment process: either Google hired a bad candidate now, or the recruiter hurried to drop my resume back then — I hope it’s the last. Of course, Google (like some other companies) is more concerned about avoiding a bad hire than about losing a good candidate — or in other words, a false-negative is preferred to a false-positive. From the employer perspective, it’s preferrable to err on the side of caution; what I’m surprised is that my resume was judged so bad that I didn’t even make it to the phone-screen.

PS: if you’re interested in a software development position at Google, you may be better-off sending your resume (CV) to a Google employee you know for them to refer you, rather than doing a spontaneous application. And second, Google is hiring in (extended) Europe and Russia, so don’t be put-off if you don’t live in the US.

Temperature

I am an european, and I’m travelling in the United States right now. Many things are different: the power voltage is 120V instead of 220V-240V in Europe. The frequency is 60Hz instead of 50Hz in Europe. The power plug is different, having two thin blades instead of two round pins in europe. This is un-convenient, as somebody coming from Europe with a laptop, mobile phone, battery charger, etc. needs a plug adapter if he’s lucky (if the device can take either 120 or 240) or a power adapter if he needs to tranform the voltage. Of course, this creates a whole market for the manufacturers of plug-adapters. When I once suggested that we (i.e. the whole world) should standardize the power plug and voltage (that is, to have a single kind of plug that works everywhere), somebody asked than what would all these companies that specialize in plug adapters do…?

In fact, the different power and plug is not present only in US, but also in Canada and Mexic. In Europe, everybody uses the normal power voltage and plugs, except United Kingdom, where the voltage is normal (230V) but the plug is specific (different from both the european and the US one). What’s interesting is that in India, which was once a British colony, the power voltage and plug are the same as in continental Europe (not the UK plugs).

In this world where people are travelling more and more often between countries and continents, this plug mismatch problem is silly. We need, we have to standardize on a plug that works everywhere, and on compatible voltage for electronic appliances. Now the question is: who should make the change? the answer is simple: let’s keep the most popular system in place (if there is a dominant system), and the countries that don’t use it already would switch. In other words: first, the UK should adopt the european plug (they don’t need to change the voltage or frequency). Second, the Northern America should switch, first the plugs and next the voltage/frequency.

On a side note: Do you think such a change is difficult? yes perhaps it is, but of course it doesn’t match the United States’ apptitude for change: a few monthe ago, the US changed the daylight saving time (summer time) hour system, getting out of sync with much the rest of the world. This seemingly small change had huge costs, but the politicians justified it by the large electricity savings they expected the different hour change to bring. As the power and plug standardization would also bring large savings in plastic, manufacturing, energy, and human dis-comfort, it looks like nothing could stop America from jumping on it.

Oh, but it’s more. Afther adopting a world-standard power system, the US could continue with adopting.. for example.. the metric system? And the Celsius temperature scale?

Of course, the natural question is, why have not these standardization steps took place already? and why would they happen now? The answer is that the US, or the (North) American continent is no longer an island. Of course, people have always travelled far away, but now there is an explosion of travel and an implosion of distances (and it’s just the beginning). What would you think if you lived in a house that had different power voltage and plugs in every room?

So, let’s imagine that the enterpresing US does it all: the switch to 230V, 50Hz, european plug, metric system, Celsius temperature. And they say: we’re done, what’s to do next? And everybody starts to think what else is left to standardize?

The Sun WTK is finally available for Linux again, you may now download the WTK v 2.5.1. The last WTK version which was available for Linux was 2.2, after that WTK was windows-only, and now by popular demand the Linux version is back.

The WTK is the primary tool for JavaME (MIDP) development, i.e. for writing midlets to run on mobile phones.