Softpanorama Russian Software Bulletin, 2003

[Nov 14, 2003] Google puts coders to the test  Third was Eugene Vasilchenko, who earned his master's degree in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Fourth was Tomasz Czajka, from Warsaw, Poland.

Google puts coders to the test
25-YEAR-OLD OUTPROGRAMS 5,000 OTHERS
By Matt Marshall
Mercury News

Turns out the Europeans can beat the best of Silicon Valley.

Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, was announced the winner Friday of Google's second annual Code Jam. He beat out more than 5,000 of the world's top programmers who signed up to compete in Google's contest to solve coding problems on deadline.

The announcement Friday came in a small, crowded room at Google's Mountain View headquarters where 25 finalists anxiously awaited the word. They'd battled in a two-hour final of four rounds, and all of them wanted to be Chief Geek.

The day went to the skinny young guys in jeans who left chocolate wrappers atop their computers.

Mardell, wearing a big smile, playfully flexed his arm muscles to loud applause. He received a large white envelope, purportedly containing his $10,000 prize, from Alan Eustace, Google's vice president of research and systems engineering. Might it also have contained a Google job offer?

Mardell hadn't opened it yet, but said he's happy at his new job in Sweden working for Elucidon, an information retrieval company. ``In a slight way, Google is a competitor,'' he said.

Someone handed him a glass of champagne, but the congratulations didn't last long: The crowd rushed by him, jockeying for position to read the solution to the final question of the round -- which no one had solved -- freshly displayed on a computer screen.

Second place went to Canada's Christopher Hendrie, 27, a computer scientist at a company called Bioinformatics Solutions. He'll spend his $5,000 check on gadgets for his KLR 650 motorbike, he said.

Third was Eugene Vasilchenko, who earned his master's degree in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Fourth was Tomasz Czajka, from Warsaw, Poland.

Eustace said there were no women in the group of 25 finalists. But he noted that the company hired two top female programmers last year, as ranked on the popular TopCoder Web site, which organizes competitions for coders, and hosted Google's. Google did not permit its employees to compete.

Mardell is ranked fifth on TopCoder, and his victory Friday was sweet because he beat TopCoder's top ranked coder and several others. He'd met many of them online, few in person. By hosting the gathering, Google surely boosted its ``geek cred.''

``Google's on the very short list of companies I'd work for,'' said Steve Newman, 36, of Portola Valley, who placed fifth and led the Bay Area's participants.

In coding, like at the horse races, you can have good and bad days, the contestants said. ``One mistake and you're out,'' says Urs Hoelzle, Google fellow and former vice president of engineering, who helped conceive of the idea as a potential recruiting tool.

Thomas Rokicki, 40, director of technology at Sunnyvale's Instantis, was the oldest finalist. He faced long odds, competing against the young ``savants,'' he said. So he took a risk, trying the hardest problem first to gain more points. The gamble failed, and he tumbled to around 20th. Still, he insisted that coding skill doesn't decline with age. It's just that older folks get rusty with lack of practice. Besides, he'd almost cracked the toughest problem: ``If I'd had five to 10 minutes more minutes, I'd be the one sitting up there with a big smile and a check in my hand,'' he said.

[Feb 2, 2003] MC 4.6.0 was released by  Pavel Roskin. Version 4.6.0 that was the first "after-Gnome" version of mc that can be called stable. In addition to removal of graphic interface, and the code was somewhat cleaned.

Porting GCC and Binutils to Windows CE

Earlier this year, Vitaliy Pronkin, a young Russian programmer, launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform. The result, according to Vitaliy, is that it is now possible to develop applications directly on a Pocket PC PDA using the standard C/C++ programming language. Specifically, source code written in eVC (MFC isn't supported yet) can be built and then executed directly on the Pocket PC (or other Windows CE device) without conversion or additional runtimes, he says.

To learn more about this interesting project, WindowsForDevices.com conducted an email interview with Vitaliy Pronkin regarding his GCC/binutils port to Pocket PC and Windows CE. Here's what we learned . . .
 

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WindowsForDevices: How long has the project existed?

Vitaliy: I started it somewhere in March, 2003. I built the cross-compiler and tools quite quickly, then began to work on a native port; and when the compiler and assembler were done, I found a big problem with the linker that I couldn't solve for a long time. I almost stopped work on the project, and resumed only several weeks ago. But this time, I found  the problem quickly, built some other tools, and when the work was done I created a website with first public version.

WindowsForDevices: Who is working on the project?

Vitaliy: The answer is short: only me.

WindowsForDevices: Why did you start the project?

Vitaliy: You know, there are several other programming/scripting languages ported/created for the Windows CE platform -- PocketC, Perl, Python, nScript, and so on. But they aren't suitable for real development -- they either require an additional interpretator at runtime, or support only a subset of the language, or can't be used for writing native PocketPC and console applications by their nature. Also, I want to develop/test programs on the go on my primary language, C/C++, and want source codes/output binaries to be compatible with other systems without requiring special runtime conversion. Really, we can use PocketPC devices in many, many ways, but weren't able to develop normal programs on them! (I tried to use Java because its compiler is also Java-based and I got it running without problems, but it's very slow and in any case worse than generating native code.)

WindowsForDevices: Is it the only C/C++ compiler available that actually runs directly on a Pocket PC / Windows CE device?

Vitaliy: As far as I know, it's the only real onboard C compiler

WindowsForDevices: What are the project's general objectives and goals?

Vitaliy: My main goal was simply to build a normal C/C++ compiler and tools for the Pocket PC platform. By "normal", I mean that it must be able to compile code taken from a desktop system with little or no changes, and that the code generated won't require any additional runtime libraries or interpretators to run.

WindowsForDevices: What is the project's current status?

Vitaliy: Briefly: My main goal is achieved. I can build samples from the Microsoft SDK (not all, perhaps; I haven't tested everything yet) without changes -- you only need to remove two commas from the resource file.

In more detail: I just ported GCC/Binutils; its pocket version has all features from the desktop one (I don't think I need to describe them here). However, the SDK isn't just a compiler and linker -- it's a set of tools plus libraries plus includes, and so on, and here I have much left to do. Includes and libraries can be taken from the standard Microsoft SDK (some changes to includes may be required because of differences between the GCC and Microsoft compilers). Tools consist of the compiler itself, assembler, linker, preprocessor, and resource compiler.

What's currently unfinished: no MFC support, no standard C++ libraries (IO streams, etc.), there are problems with floating-point emulation, and exception handling isn't fully supported.

WindowsForDevices: What versions of Windows Embedded does it work on?

Vitaliy: I have tested it on Windows Mobile 2003 and PocketPC 2002 devices. Basically, it requires an ARM processor but doesn't use any special system features -- it's just set of console tools! So I think it will work on any Windows CE device with an ARM-compatible processor. But I don't have any other devices to try, so I'm awaiting feedback from owners of different devices.

WindowsForDevices: What is the advantage of your GCC/binutils tools over Microsoft's standard language tools?

Vitaliy: Because I didn't want to build tools better than standard but just wanted to have them onboard, I can simply answer that there are no advantages -- source code is compatible and enough. But now I want to be able to compile not only GUI applications using standard libraries taken from desktop eVC, I also want to compile console applications taken from any system and originally written for GCC compiler. I can't guarantee that this will be done sometime (and really I don't want to simply port many GNU libraries and tools), but at least standard C++ libraries and exception handling will be done, I hope. Taking into account that the standard eVC tools don't support C++ style exceptions and many standard libraries/functions (especially for developing console apps), it turns out that my tools are in some cases better than Microsoft's.

WindowsForDevices: Where can developers obtain the software?

Vitaliy: The "official" download site is here. It can also be downloaded from PocketGear, but I recommend visiting official site regularly -- I'll update it more often than any other download location. I think there will be many new versions in the near future.

WindowsForDevices: What's your future development roadmap?

Vitaliy: Of course the main task is to test it on different sources, find, and fix existing problems. After that -- exception handling, standard C++ library, MFC support, shell for easier usage, text editor, and maybe some other libraries for better compatibility with different sources.

WindowsForDevices: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on your project -- and good luck!

---

About Vitaliy Pronkin: Vitaliy is a 19-year-old student attending the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. His specialties include programming, web-development and design, and system administration. In the small amount of time that remains after studing and work, Vitaly likes to find relaxation in music, computer games, and collecting "small figures of snails." Vitaly says one of his goals is to make PDAs more independent from desktops.

BeOpen.com Interview with Hans Reiser of ReiserFS  -- he used the top Russian talent to write the filesystem. In this interview he shares his view on small business opportunities in Russia

BeOpen: Why did you relocate to Russia of all places? Is there some hidden vein of file system coding talent in the former Soviet Union nobody else knows about?

Reiser: Actually, I read in the newspaper about the horrible salaries that people were making here, and I thought that this was an opportunity for me to give them an opportunity. At the same time, I also thought it was an opportunity to make possible a dream that I'd always wanted to do -- run my own company. And it worked. It was really quite difficult, but in the end, the whole thing worked out.

If I had it to do over again, I would work in the U.S. for several years and save up my money and then would have come over to Russia with the money I saved up, so that I could be here in person rather than communicating over the Internet.

BeOpen: Why? I thought it was a truism that open source projects can get by with a minimum of face-to-face interaction.

Reiser: I personally like to have everyone all in one large room. I know this isn't the popular model with most people, but information diffuses. It's useful to have people within eye contact of each other. The most productive work environment that I was in was back at the University [of California], where it was my fellow students and I working at a large computer. We were within eye contact and could share information casually. You share a lot more information when you don't have to get up and walk to somebody's room.

The cost of information diffusion is less when you can talk to someone than when you send them an email. The costs of sending an email aren't prohibitive, but there are costs.

Even now we mix the two models, though. I still have employees who don't work in Moscow. I have one who works in St. Petersburg, one who works in the Ukraine and another who works in Asia, but for the most part, I tend to find the best work gets done when people are located in the same room.

Having said that, I should also say that there are many advantages in doing work over the Internet, especially in Russia. Usually, companies here are crippled by customs officials and all sorts of equivalent government controls. When there's no physical object to move around, there's no opportunity for a customs official to get involved. You don't have to pay a bribe to use the Internet.

Maybe this will change. Maybe 200 years from now governments will be involved in controlling the flow of information over the Internet. Maybe not. It remains to be seen. If we're vigorous enough in making it difficult for them to impede our ability to interact with each other, maybe we can avoid that. Still, there are always people eager to set themselves up as highway robbers.

BeOpen: The stories about the Russian business climate definitely can raise the hair on the back of your neck. How does it differ from the U.S., at least from the entrepreneurial perspective?

Reiser: You make of it what you will. If you have a small business, it's the same as doing it in the United States. If you have a large business, Russia is lethal. I would say that large companies should stay out of Russia, because Russian culture is very accustomed to large organizations that don't work. Large governments and large businesses are virtually indistinguishable in that regard. Russian culture has achieved mastery at foiling the aspirations of the persons at the top of large organizations. I would say that Russia is much better for small businesses than large businesses

BeOpen: Why is it so lethal for larger businesses? Is it because of the corruption?

Reiser: It's more than that. If you're in a situation where you have to manage by receiving reports, you're doomed. If you can be satisfied by a pretty report -- and most corporations are -- then you're just doomed.

I think Cisco could make a go of it here, because their management style is heavily based upon random sampling. That's why Cisco has been able to scale so large and so effectively. Random sampling will working Russia as well as it would anywhere else. You have to randomly sample quality, and you have to randomly sample production and output to make sure the information you as a manager are getting corresponds with the information your customers and employees are getting.

It's the same in any culture, I guess. There's a saying: Cultures do not differ. They only exaggerate. This is more true in Russia.

BeOpen: What is the attitude toward Open Source and free software in Eastern Europe. People like Richard Stallman have observed that in Russia and China, people tend to be more hostile to the notion of community software development, because it smacks of socialism, a concept most view as terribly outdated.

Reiser: I understand why Richard says that. I would say that people don't want to talk about it anymore, but there are still people who want to do it. They just don't want to talk about the theory and the wonderfulness of it.

Not every person is the right person to recruit to a project. Not every person is going to be attracted to Open Source software. There are people in Russia and the United States who just have no real interest in giving software away for free. They just don't see what it gets them, and the easiest thing is to just avoid trying to do business with them.

BeOpen: What about the flip side of that argument. How do people view the notion of using community-based software development methods as a means towards free market, capitalistic ends.

Reiser: I'd say it's viewed with great skepticism. I don't think anybody working with it is planning to get rich. We probably will make them financially well off over the next several years. And it's my hope that we will make quite a bit of money, but I don't think they chose to work on this project because they saw this as their best route to becoming wealthy. I think most of them are working on this because they are scientists and they care about it from a scientific perspective.

BeOpen: What's the talent pool like in Eastern Europe? We already know that a significant portion of Linux development is coming out of that region. Has it been easy to find quality programmers?

Reiser: I think if you take the cream of any nation, it's going to be great. The advantage that we have is that there's a lot less competition for the cream of Russia. We're able to offer the deeply talented a good opportunity that they probably won't find elsewhere in Russia. If you want to do core operating systems research, here in Russia, we're one of the best opportunities to do it. That definitely helps with recruiting,

BeOpen: Here in the U.S., we've had a few ventures pop up within the last year in which companies have tried to create an eBay auction style process, letting freelance programmers bid on projects for U.S. software firms. One company, the Seattle-based CoSource, said they were getting a number of bids from programmers in Russia, because the salary differential between U.S. and Russian-based software work is so high.

Reiser: That makes a lot of sense that the low bids would come from Eastern Europe, because the salaries are much lower here. That's changing very quickly, though. Prices are going up for programmers, because Russia has opened up. Now prices of 1,000-3,000 are common for top people. My guess is that $1500 per month is about the going rate for a highly successful senior developer. When I started, it was a lot less. Fortunately, we're making money now and so we're able to pay the increased rates.

OLinux - Seu site de Linux na Internet -- interview with Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin, a native of Moscow, graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. Brin is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Brin's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen publications in leading academic journals, including "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web"; "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," which he published with Larry Page; "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures"; "Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data"; and "Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations."

OLinux: When did you start this company? What was your initial motivation and how do you see it nowadays? Sergey Brin: We started working on Google in 1995, as a research project at Stanford University. In 1998, we formed the company, Google Inc., and launched the search engine in beta to the outside world. This happened in September 1998. Our goal was to created a very simple and easy-to-use website that offers the best search engine in the world. This is still our goal, and we plan to continue to focus our business on search technology for some time to come.

OLinux: Please, evaluate rapidly Google evolution in terms of pages served using its tools? Can you describe something that really helped the project to succeeded? Have any idea of number of sites using Google search engine? Number of pages served by google engine every day?

Sergey Brin: Google currently servers over 20 million searches per day on our own website (www.google.com), and over 50 million searches per day on our own site and our partner websites (Yahoo, Netscape, Cisco, etc.). Have so many smart and talented employees has really helped our company succeed. There are over 25,000 websites on the Internet that use the Google search engine.

OLinux: Why should a site choose Google search engine instead of others? What are the better features Google bring to users?

Sergey Brin: Google offers users better quality search results, a simple, easy-to-use interface, high performance, and an exclusive focus on just being a search engine. We also offer cool features like caches pages, stock quotes, news headlines, links to online maps.

OLinux: Let's talk about P&D and Software Engineering (Se): How many people work in SE activities developing google main tools? What is its policy toward investment in P&D?

Sergey Brin: We have about 80 engineers and R&D team members, and we're big fans of investing heavily in R&D.

OLinux: How is the research & development coordinated? What are the analysis and programming tools used? Are there any special quality control, auditing on code produced?What are the main projects under way?

Sergey Brin: They're very closely intertwined; developers do research and vice versa, and everyone talks a lot. Communication is very good between both of these groups.

For programming we use gnu tools: gcc, gdb, gnats. We use p4 for version control. For network installs, we use a variety of our own software, in addition to rsync. Machines are built on-site here at Google, configured, then shipped over to one of our three datacenters.

We have a detailed regimen for code reviews and testing (QA).

The main projects we're working on, outside of improving the overall quality of our search engine are: Google wireless search technology, a variety of voice recognition projects, and Google international search technology bringing Google to more users worldwide.

OLinux: Currently, Google search engine runs in more than 5000 Red hat Linux servers. I read that Google system install and configure 80 servers at a time. What kind of tools coordinate this mass installation? What are the administrative tools used to monitor, check and replace servers failures? How is Linux used at the Google Projects? Why was Linux choose to improve Google search engine?

Sergey Brin: Actually, we currently run over 6,000 RedHat servers.

Linux is used everywhere...on the 6,000+ servers themselves, as well as desktop machines for all of our technical employees. We chose Linux because if offers us the price for performance ratio. It's so nice to be able to customize any part of the operating system that we like, at anytime. We have a large degree of in-house Linux expertise, too.

Most of our administrative tools were developed in-house, as well.

OLinux: What is Google security policy and how is it implemented?

Sergey Brin: Most of our machines are behind a router and not accessible to the outside world. The outside-accessible machines (webservers) are carefully audited for security holes.

We also use ssh an awful lot. :-)

www.perl.com - Ilya Regularly Expresses  -- interview with Dr. Ilya Zakharevich

I see you received your Ph.D from Moscow State. Political ideology aside, do you think the Russian education system is more effective than that of the US? What element is most lacking in US higher education today?

IZ: The short answers: you cannot put ideology aside; elementary education.

Now the longer ones. It is extremely difficult to compare the systems. And the results would depend on how deep you are ready to dig. First, consider the purely subjective feelings. (Especially important since "objective" comparisons produce almost pure garbage.) Yes, it feels like the Russian system gives much better results than the U.S. one. On the other hand, look at top level achievers. Obviously, the "stars" in the U.S. were not less starry than the "stars" in the SU.

One of the reasons for a possibly skewed perception is an unbelievable concentration of resources in Russia. Let's look: scratching the surface, SU was significantly larger than US, it is enough to mention 10 (or 11?) time zones. It was a big surprise for me when after several months in US I understood that my feelings about the size were exactly the opposite to the "objective" sizes. Digging into these feelings brought the following conjecture: subjectively SU was a disk with the radius circa 25 miles.

Why? Imagine that 80% of everything good was in Moscow. Out of the rest, 15% were in Leningrad and Kiev. (I'm still subjective!) Well, there is some distance between Moscow and Leningrad, but given sleeper trains, it mostly disappears. This was squeezing resources into a very tight knot. The critical mass requires high mass and high density simultaneously, both were present. The synergetic effects were omnipresent.

Imagine a prevalent migration of talents to metropolises with a negligible back-current. Imagine that top students go not to 25 different universities, but to one, and stay there (the math department in the Moscow University is 5..10 times larger than the largest math departments in the USA). What does this lead to? If you are a good student, then the proportion of good students around you would be much higher.

This skews perceptions, but there is also a giant "objective" boost due to increased interaction between "stars" (and "starlets"). US students in general are much more ready to work hard, but their achievements in the domain of their immediate speciality are only as good as those for Russian students, and not spectacularly better. Typically their knowledge outside this narrow region wishes a lot of improvement.

Additionally, for the most of the beneficial factors, one would not want to copy them. Why "stars" remain in Moscow? Because there was no way to go abroad. What choices there were for a bright kid? Very few. Learn, learn, and learn. What choices there were for philanthropy? Very few. Teach, teach, and teach. Just consider the payroll differential, which was at most 2x--4x. So even if elementary education was relatively low-paying, the enthusiasts would not be stopped by this: the difference was not that striking.

Consider also differences in the spending pattern. It was not absolutely ridiculous to spend 10% or 15% of your income on books. Books being cheap, you could allow yourselves to buy all the decent books in your wide speciality, and several related specialities, not even mentioning what is called "literature" in US. Clearly, there is no way to graft this to the US situation.

Now a theory one of my friends favors, take it at least as a parable: The humanitarian aspect of the elementary education in the U.S. is based on tolerance, basically, all the ideas are considered created equal. Pluralism, respect for opinions of other persons, the ability to look at the problem from different sides and so on. So far so good. Now: math is based on exactly the opposite premise: some arguments are correct, some are wrong. People can tell them apart.

This creates a conflict. Correspondingly, all non-mechanical aspects of math, which is the ultimate device to transfer knowledge in a reproducible way, and to build new knowledge, are censored out (not necessarily consciously). Now kids come to university: "Proof? Eh?" Bad? Would you like to sacrifice the widespread tolerance to improve math?

So my point is: a lot of ground for success of the Russian education system was hardwired into the ideological situation. However, it might be that the situation already bootstrapped itself into a self-supporting state of a widespread readiness to get fascination from a play of mind, even if this play requires some nontrivial mental tension. Maybe this readiness can survive the "return to the normal ideology."

Suppose that all you need is such a readiness in a sufficient number of teachers, and this would create enough interested pupils to form the next generation of such teachers. How to bootstrap such a situation in U.S.? There may be some US-specific answers which I would not be able to even imagine. Something crazy like a philanthropist buying an hour a week on MTV, with MTV specialists who know how to speak to kids-of-today collaborating with science enthusiasts and some cold minds (so that it would not degenerate into another kindergarten like Sesame Street).

Myself, I favor something less focussed on the situation of today. Say, there are teacher's conventions anyway. Why not organize math/physics/chemistry/biology/linguistics problem-solving competition there? It would be quite low-budget. Here I mean "cool" problems, as on international olympiads (but of course, slightly simpler). It should not be hard to find volunteers to design the problems, the Bay Area already has a Russian-style math olympiad running.

Russian Translation  (by Sergey Koropthe) of the paper Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research   is now available

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