Sunday, August 28, 2011

*** interview with creator of “AdBlock” extension for Chrome and Safari***


Hi Friends

“AdBlock” is very nice and powerful extension for block unwanted ads. It’s really perfect, and it’s available for both Google Chrome and Safari Browsers.

AdBlock For Google chrome: http://chromeadblock.com/

AdBlock For Safari: http://safariadblock.com

Recently, I interviewed with AdBlock Creator Mr Michael Gundlach, that he was one of Google’s employees in the past. See the interview below:

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011:

HiThank you again for accept my interview request.

Michael Gundlach: You're very welcome! :)

Questions:


1. Please introduce yourself.

I'm Michael Gundlach, I'm 30 years old, I'm married to a wonderful woman named Katie. I've been programming since I was 8 years old, and I went to the University of Georgia for my undergraduate and graduate degree in Computer Science.


2. What’s your purpose from manufacturing AdBlock extension? When you started this project? And With which language you created it?

I was inspired by the Adblock Plus project on Firefox. They had no plans to build a Chrome version, and I loved Chrome, so I built AdBlock for Chrome in 2009, and Apple asked me to port it to Safari in 2010. It's all JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

I built and support AdBlock because I pretty passionately dislike the values underlying advertising. America has developed a consumerist culture where people buy things they don't need with money they don't have, to the point where they can't get themselves out of debt. Many advertisements use sex to sell their products, which degrades women and manipulates men. People overcoming pornography addictions are subjected to temptation just by viewing the advertising that our culture produces.

So, by helping people block ads, I'm helping a tiny bit to free them from consumerism, to treat women as equals with men, and to help men not be controlled by sex. I'm happy with that! Also, I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, and these goals line up perfectly with Christian values.

And of course on top of the ideological reasons, the ads themselves are visually distracting and annoying, and they take up bandwidth. One user told me he gets fewer vomiting migraine headaches thanks to AdBlock blocking the flashing ads that trigger them. A pastor told me he recommends AdBlock to his church members when they need help recovering from porn addiction. A user in the military told me it makes browsing so much easier because the internet connections are often bandwidth-constrained. A blind user told me AdBlock makes him able to read pages more clearly because his screen reader can skip over speaking all the ads. Stories like these help me keep going :)

3. What’s about statics? How many persons downloaded it (for Chrome/for Safari)?

I don't know about downloads, but there are over two and a half million 7-day active users on Chrome, and somewhere around 1 to 2 million Safari users. Safari doesn't automatically ship AdBlock updates to users, so I don't have statistics on all the users who installed before I recently added code to count users.

4. Are you received a complaint from Advertise agencies and big companies because of blocking their ads? Is this legal in USA?

The only complaint I got was informal: after I presented AdBlock for Safari at Apple's 2010 developer conference, a guy walked up and said he worked for a large news/ads company and that they hated my work -- but that he himself loved it. I think most advertisers realize that the people who install AdBlock tend to be the ones who are less likely to click on the ads in any case.

It is indeed legal for users to view web pages however they want to view them. I'm not aware of any country where customizing a web browser's display is illegal.

5. What’s your plan for Adblock in future?

In the short term, there's an exciting new feature coming. Due to imperfect support in the browser, AdBlock hasn't been able to block ads within Flash games or within non-Youtube videos. The Chrome team is now adding better support for AdBlock, so I should be able to add this feature as soon as the Chrome team finish their work -- and my users will automatically get the update. (No such luck for Safari users, but you can switch to Chrome on Mac if you want this feature.)

In the long term, I'd like to see so many people using ad blockers that advertisers have to start paying more attention to the users' interests. In a perfect world, every ad would be so unobtrusive and pleasant that no one wanted to block them. I doubt that's going to happen, but it would be great if users could opt in with a single click to just the types of ads they wanted -- "only text ads", or "any ad that isn't sexual", or "only ads that have been targeted by my browsing habits."

This would require broad support from advertisers, so at the moment the only opt-in AdBlock offers is to text ads on Google search results, which are easy enough to detect that this feature didn't require support from Google.

6. When you start programming? What’s your first favors in technology world?

My brother is 13 years older than I, and when he was at university and I was 8 he helped me get started programming in BASIC on my father's 286 PC. I started with really simple games, such as an "Olympic javelin throwing program" that in Python would be written

for i in range(80):

print ' ' * i + '*'


but I'm sure was messier in BASIC. I got a book full of BASIC programs from the library and read through it; I modified the QBASIC games Nibbles and Gorilla on my mother's work computer; I wrote a diary program with an ASCII art animation of a diary opening. I loved programming and couldn't get enough of it (and still can't).

My father helped me build my own 386 (by the time Pentiums were popular), which was hugely exciting. I taught myself Pascal and wrote simple choose-your-own-adventure stories and more complex text adventures for my relatives (well, "complex" although all you could do was move from room to room, pick up things, and eat them.) By 16 I was writing in C++, so when I went to university I had 8 or 9 years of experience.

7. What’s your other projects and applications before AdBlock? Can you
tell about them?

My graduate university project changed the way wireless routers sent traffic to handheld computers, to save battery power.

In my professional life, in order, I've contributed to hospital management software, worked for Google's Ads Site Reliability team (ironically), built a couple of e-commerce websites, written embedded C in medical equipment, designed a network simulator using the Google Maps API, improved the search engine at CareerBuilder.com using genetic algorithms, and built part of the OpenStack cloud computing system.

In my personal time, I've written predator/prey simulations, a speech-to-text Python module, genetic algorithms that draw pretty pictures, a chat server for my fiancee and me to chat halfway across the world before instant messaging existed, several educational programs for my wife's students, a CPU simulation, and a robot that you can call on the phone to play Twenty Questions with. Oh, and at university I wrote a trojan horse that replaced the UNIX login screen with my own program and then said "gotcha!" when you typed in your password. I lost the chance to be a computer lab supervisor over that one :)

And on top of all that, there are the dozens if not hundreds of programs that I've written, lost, and forgotten about. To any of your readers who are just getting started in programming and find that they love it: PLEASE put all your code in a code repository somewhere, so that 20 years later you can look back at it all fondly! It'll hurt to lose it. I'm still holding on to the .exe of the giant choose-your-own-adventure I wrote when I was 15, since I lost the source code but could maybe reverse engineer the assembly one day.

8. With which programming languages you work?

In addition to JavaScript for AdBlock, I use Python and bash for automating some development tasks. Python has been my favorite language for years, though JavaScript is catching up on it. I thought C# was great before I discovered Python :)

9. What do you think about Web 2.0 and advertising on Web 2.0? Can you present a solution to have more ethical advertising on web 2.0 without annoying users while it can be profitable for companies and people?

I think I answered this one above. If users can limit the ads they see to those they are happy to see, users will be happier, users will pay more attention per ad, users will click more ads, and advertisers and publishers will make more money. At least, that's what I hope!

10. I write some words. Please write your opinion about each word:

Computer: A tool that can be used for good or for evil.

Internet: The best hope for democracy for the oppressed.

Programming: The profession that comes closest to making ideas come to life.

Advertise: See above ;)

Adblock! : This makes me think of staying up much too late to write code back when AdBlock wasn't my full-time work; and of the users who email me to say thank you; and that I'm using my skills to make the world a slightly better place.

Internet users: I'm impressed that I get much more positive feedback from users on the Internet than negative feedback. I expected to hear only negativity. Maybe AdBlock users just tend to be nicer people :)

Privacy policy: "Privacy" on the net almost always makes me think of Google -- that they work so hard to keep your data safe from those who want to see it, that they were the first to make a privacy policy in simple language, that they fight to protect the identities of anonymous bloggers on their systems, and that they've continued to fight for privacy as companies like Facebook treat it so lightly. I'm hoping Google+ helps people see that there's an alternative to making all their information public.

Humanities: I think that humanity is inherently flawed, and that we can trust Jesus to save us from this inability to have a relationship with God.

Freedom: Perhaps the most important requirement for living a happy life.

Civilization: Sorry, all this really makes me think of is the video game, which I've never played.

USA: Despite its problems, I think it's the best government on Earth. The individual leaders may not be great, but I'm so blessed to have so much freedom, and the security that comes with a peaceful electoral process, and that freedom of speech is built into our government, and that I can freely criticize my leaders...

11. What’s your suggestion to people that interested in programming?

If you're new to programming and you like math, play with Project Euler to develop your skills while having fun. If you like games, try building a Tetris clone in JavaScript and HTML5. If you like music, write a Python script that reads a text file full of notes and plays a song. If you like food, write a website that lets you store recipes. Yesterday I wrote a Python script for my church that automates cleaning up and compressing the sermon audio and publishing it to our website (http://faithpcachurch.org/sermons.php ). Just write programs related to things you're passionate about.

When you need more experience, find an open source project you care about and find out how to contribute to it. Some large examples are jQuery, Django, Python, Ubuntu. Or find one on GitHub that looks interesting and dive in. AdBlock is also open source, though it's tiny by comparison.

*** thanks a lot from Mr Michael Gundlach because of participate in this interview ***

If you made an interview with a programmer or technology master, please notify me by leave a comment…

Best Luck!

(Source: http://theFastPerfectionist.Blogspot.com )

*** my interview with one of CloudSafe team members ***


Sometimes in my free time, I make interviews with technology masters. This is very fun for me and I learn some useful things from these interviews…

Last year (2010), I interviewed with one of Cloud Safe team members, and I published this interview on my Persian blog. But now, I want to share it in my English blog…

About Cloud Safe:


CloudSafe offers a secure platform for your most sensitive data sharing needs

· Create different safes for different data. Whether it be a single PIN or thousands of legal documents, you can assign to every safe different levels of access for other parties or keep access solely with you.

· Account registration on CloudSafe is always free. That means anyone you share data with can gain access to the files at no charge. You only pay to use extended features.

For more information, go to its Website: https://secure.cloudsafe.com

For more acquaintance with this platform, I made an Interview with Founder of Clod Safe that you see it below:


1. Please introduce Your Company.

CloudSafe was incorporated November 2009. We started developing our platform in January 2010 and went live end of August 2010. A total of 12 people were involved in the development of CloudSafe.com

2. What’s Your Purpose of establish CloudSafe.com ? and With Which software(s) & Language(s) You create it ? and What’s Your Future Schedule for CloudSafe ?

I am working as an IT professional for many years. We were looking for a platform to exchange highly critical data (server keys, certificates and password) for our projects and we did not find any provider that satisfied our need for highly encrypted online storage. We had a look at PGP but considered the solutions quite expensive in licensing and maintenance. So we decided to develop our own solution. The project grew substantially from there. Now it´s a platform to store everything, from a single password up to thousands of files.

Most of the platform is developed in Java. Except some critical encryption functionalities.

We will offer an API in near future: So you can develop your own services or clients and use CloudSafe as a secure online storage provider. Think of backup software, password managers, secure messaging products. All could store and exchange data by using our API.


3. You have written in your Website: “Cloud Safe is not able to access your data itself. This is our guarantee.” How? Please more explain about it.

Data that arrives at our servers will be directly encrypted, chunk by chunk.* Content of any customers "safe" will be stored encrypted. For all users we use a public/private key infrastructure (as in PGP or GnuPG). Keys to the data are encrypted with the public key of the user. The private key of the user will never be stored unencrypted. It is only used the moment the user accesses his data. We will soon be offering end-to-end encryption via the API as well.

If someone would get hold of our database and of our storage he would not be able to read any of the safe content.

(* only the safe name and public description will not be encrypted since we use it in emails if you consider to share the safe content with other users on the platform)



4. What’s your supplies for Hacking and attacks ?

Well, we have a dedicated team making sure that we can identify and counter attacks on our site. We cannot go into further details for security reasons but we take this issue very seriously.


5. What's difficulties Of internet Security in Your Country And in the World ? what’s your view about it?

Germany has very strong privacy laws. We store all data on dedicated servers here in Germany. We feel confident about our laws to protect the privacy of the data stored at CloudSafe. We know that is not the case in all other countries. But our company is in Germany and we work by german law.


6. What's your Recommendations to Companies and users for guard their Data?

Take precautions for your sensitive data! There are far too many ways your data could be compromised. Set high standard in storing and exchanging data. Do not use regular cloud storage providers with unencrypted, sensitive data. And no, exchanging critical informations via email is not secure! Leaked data could be much more expensive than taking precautions now.


7. I Write Some Words , Please Write Your view And credo About Which Word :

Computer :
Useful helpers in everyday work.

Internet : Connectivity to the world. Access to amazingly lots of resources to learn.

Security: Becoming the key issue for the internet in the next 2 years.

Innovation: Much easier to innovate on the Internet. Feedback is instant.

Success : Will follow innovation.


*** With Thanks from Mr. Roberto Valerio for participate in this Interview ***

If you interviewed with a programmer or technology master, please let’s know by leaving a comment…

Source: http://theFastPerfectionist.Blogspot.com

***interview with Mike Champion, one of “OneForty” Team members***

Twitter apps are deploying day by day and number of these applications is too much, as many people don’t know that many of these applications are in existence!

OneForty is a place to solve this problem…

One of OneForty team members is Mike Champion that you can find more information about him on his blog: www.graysky.org


I interviewed with him last year and published it in my Persian Blog. Now I republish it here:


Interview:


1.Please introduce Yourself?
Hi, I'm Mike Champion. I'm a software developer near Boston, Massachusetts.

2. When You began Programming? How did you Learn Programming?
I really didn't start programming until college, which is relatively late compared to many. I had always been interested in computers, computer games and playing around, but didn't write code until college. When I started taking Computer Science classes I was excited about this whole new world, and spent a lot of time learning C, Unix, HTML, JavaScript, Perl in short order. I was hooked!

3. What’s Your Purpose of make “One forty” website ? and With Which Language You Create it? and What’s Your Future Schedule for “One forty”?

The goal of oneforty is to make it simpler for people to find Twitter tools that make their lives easier and get the most out of Twitter. And to help developers promote & sell their products. The website is built using Ruby on Rails.

4. and How About other of your Twitter Projects? for example about
Who Should I Follow”?
"Who Should I Follow" was a project a friend and I built that gives recommendations on who to follow on Twitter. Twitter can be confusing when you first start using it, and it is a way to find interesting people to follow. It's built in Ruby on Rails and Java, for performance reasons.

5. How revenue Of Programming in Your Country ? ( In IRAN is Not Well now Because Iran Haven’t Copy Right Law Now , And Other Problems...)
Many programmers in the United States make a good living. In fact, the U.S. needs more good programmers than it currently has.

6. What’s Your View About Twitter Developing ? and What’s Your Recommendation for Twitter and Face Book Developers ?
The development of social software like Twitter & Facebook is exciting because it is relatively easy to build something that can be used by a great number of people. Twitter is fun for programmers because it is a simple API, that allows access to millions of people and lots of
interesting data. Getting started is pretty simple, but building a service that is heavily used can be tricky!

7. What's difficulties Of Programming in Your Country And in the World? Can You render a solution ?
The good news about the last 10 years is that quality information about programming is much easier to find online, and there are many platforms that are easy to get started building on. Today, any student can create a website (or a Twitter app!) that can be seen by people all around the world.

8. With Which programming language you are Working ?
These days I primarily work in Ruby plus Javascript.

9. What’s Your View About Future of Web2 and Web3 that Will be Coming in future ?
The most interesting question to me about the (near) future of web development is around mobile. Currently there is a boom in creating native mobile apps for platforms like iPhone & Android, but at the same time there is progress in mobile browsers, HTML5 and mobile
network speed. There is a cost to targeting multiple platforms, and at the same time mobile Webkit is becoming the de facto standard (with RIM embracing it for their latest OS). I'm interested to see which apps continue as mobile apps, and which remain webapps targeted for
mobile devices.

10. What's Your Recommendations To Programmers And Companies ?
That's a broad question, but I think if there is a theme it would be that you can do a lot these days for little money. For programmers, there is a lot of information online. It doesn't take much money to build interesting projects if you have the motivation and time. For companies, you can run experiments for small amounts of money to test ideas about your business.

**** thanks from Mr Mike Champion for take Part in my interview****

If you made an interview with a programmer or technology master, please notify me by leave a comment…

Best Luck!

(Source: http://theFastPerfectionist.Blogspot.com )

*** interview with one members on KMail developer team***

Hi

KMail is a very nice Email Manager software for Linux users. This is one of KDE productions (See: www.KDE.org)

Last year, I interviewed with one of team members of KDE developer team, Mr Ingo Klöcker and I published it in my Persian blog. Now I republish it in English:


On Wednesday 10 March 2010:

1.Please introduce yourself.
I'm Ingo Klöcker and I'm 38 years old. I studied Mathematics and did a Ph.D. in Number Theory. Now I'm working as Development Manager in a software company doing medical imaging. I was born in Aachen (Germany) and I'm currently living in Bremen (Germany).


2.When You began Programming? How did You Learn Programming?
At the age of 12 (or 13?) I was first introduced to programming by a neighbor who had an Apple IIe. At this time I wrote my first, very basic programs in BASIC. At the age of 16 I took a course in university for learning Pascal. Then I had three years of Computer Science at high school, but to be honest I didn't really learn that much in high school. I mostly learned programming by simply doing it, i.e. by writing programs in my spare time.


3.Why You Choose Linux OS ?
I was introduced to Linux during my vocational training. Shortly afterwards I bought my first Linux distribution. It was love on first sight. Since then Linux has been my main OS and I did only boot into Windows for playing games. Now I use Linux exclusively at home.


And if Softwares of Linux are Free , How Programmers Earn Money in Linux?!
It's not Linux software that's free, but Free Software that's free. Of course, a lot of software written for Linux is Free Software, but there is also a lot of proprietary software written for Linux.

Many programmers who do earn money with Linux do so by selling services or by working for companies that develop software for Linux.


4.When Kmail Project Started ?
The KMail project was started shortly after the start of the KDE project. I don't know the exact date. The first date mentioned in the CHANGES file is 1997-05-09, but there have been three "releases" before this date (0.0.1, 0.0.2, and 0.0.3).


5.How About the Last Version of Kmail ?
The latest version of KMail is the one that is part of KDE SC 4.4. We are currently working on porting KMail to our new backend Akonadi. At the same time we are working on making KMail more modular, so that its main components can be used independently of each other by other
applications with similar needs.


And How About Kmail Security?
KMail supports signing and encryption with OpenPGP since a very long time. Actually, my first contributions to KMail were related to KMail's OpenPGP support. Since KDE SC 3.1 (released in January 2003) KMail supports PGP/MIME and S/MIME, i.e. the two most important standards for signing and encryption of email messages. This development was done in close collaboration with the developers of GnuPG.
Of course, KMail also supports the necessary protocols for secure connections with mail servers, i.e. SSL and TLS together with the corresponding authentication methods (e.g. CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, NTLM, and GSSAPI).

KMail has always had a focus on security. For example, any active content in email messages (e.g. JavaScript) is ignored. Moreover, by default external links in HTML messages are not resolved to protect the privacy of the user. (External links in HTML messages are often used for
tracking whether a recipient has read a messages.)


6.Were You Wrote A Program For Mobile too?
The Kolab Konsortium which added the support for PGP/MIME and S/MIME I mentioned above is currently working on bringing Kontact to Windows Mobile 6.5 devices and to the N900.


7.On which Project You Are working NOW ? Can You tell me ?
I'm still working on KMail, but I'm not doing actual development work
anymore. Instead, nowadays I'm active in user support.


8.What's difficulties Of Programming in Your Country And in the World? Can You render A solution ?

I'm not sure what you mean. So I cannot answer this question. Maybe you can rephrase it.


9.With Which programming language You are Working ?

C++ and a bit of Python.


10. I Write Some Words , Please Write Your view And credo About Which Word :

Computer :
Computers are ubiquitous (at least in the Western world). I'm not sure
whether that's good or bad.
Programming: I love programming. :-)

Internet: Free access to information (via the Internet) is one of the core requirements for a free world.

Linux: Linux rocks.


Success: Every man (and woman) is the architect of his (or her) own fortune.

چو تو خود كنی اختر خویش را بد/ مدار از فلك چشم نیك اختری را
(I hope this is correct. I copied it from a web page.)
(editor: this is from a Persian poem that means: when you destroy your chance, so don’t expect fortune from sky…)

Cigarette: I loathe smoking.
Civilization: Civilization is a great game.


11.What's Your Recommendations To Programmers And Companies?

Write Free Software!



*** thanks a lot from Mr Ingo Klöcker for participate in this interview***

If you interviewed with a programmer or technology master, please let’s know by leaving a comment…

(Source: http://theFastPerfectionist.Blogspot.com)

*** interview with creator of iTweet, Colby Palmer ***


Hi

There are many Clients for twitter because programmers can work with API and change & customize it. Many people prefer to work with clients because of their features…

One of the best Clients for Twitter is “iTweet”. It’s usable for PC, iPhone and Android. See it: www.iTweet.net

Last year, I made an interview with the creator of iTweet, Mr Colby Palmer. And I published this interview on my Persian blog (in both Persian and English). Now I republish it’s English version:

On Mar 10, 2010:

Hi

1.Please introduce yourself.

Colby Palmer

Age: 33

Web Developer and Designer

Born in Colorado, USA

Lives in the San Francisco Bay Area

( Colby Palmer's official website: www.ColbyPalmer.com)


2.When You began Programming ? How did You Learn Programming ?

I became interested in the Internet while in art school. Machines were becoming powerful enough that you could actually show video over the web (imagine that). I began exploring ways of making Internet-based art, and this led me down the path of "how do I build this?"

3.What’s Your Purpose of itweet ? and With Which Language You Creat it? and What’s Your Future Schedule for iTweet ?

I built iTweet originally as a web-based client for the iPhone. The interface was popular enough that people often requested a larger version of it. So I built a completely different, much faster Web version and this is what iTweet became. It allows for easy use of Twitter search, bit.ly and TweetPhoto directly in the interface. It is currently pending another complete rewrite to put a database behind the front end. This will allow for multiple accounts, better friend management and much more.

4.What’s Your View About Twitter Developing ? and What’s Your Recommendation for Twitter and Face Book Developers ?

I love working with API's - however I caution developers against basing their entire business model on a 3rd-party API. Bad service or change in TOS can change your whole plan and there would be nothing you could do about it.

5.Were You Wrote a Program For Mobile, too?

Yes, try http://itweet.net on iPhone or Android! However the site is not for WAP browsers.

6.How revenue Of Programming in Your Country ? ( in IRAN is Not Well Because IRAN Haven’t a clear Copy Right Law Now , And Other Problems …)

It is good, there is enough Internet business (especially in the San Francisco area) that I stay very busy. :)


7.On which Project You Are working NOW ? Can You tell me ?

I am working on a business collaboration tool that is launching very soon! I will announce it on my blog when it opens for signups.


8.What's difficulties Of Programming in Your Country And in the World ? Can You render A solution ?

Currently bandwidth is still an issue for serving video, and IMO http could use a bit of an upgrade. But, the nature of programming is overcoming difficulties - most programmers enjoy this. If we ran out of difficulties we would probably lose interest and move on.


9.With Which programming language You are Working ?

Python, Javascript, PHP, (X)HTML, CSS

10. I Write Some Words , Please Write Your view And credo About
Which Word :

Computer: tool
Programming: challenge
Internet: channel
Twitter: discovery
Success: independence
Cigarette: *cough*

Civilization: world community
USA: home ground
IRAN !: OMG you Guys! I need to make you a RTL version of
ITWEET.NET!


11.What's Your Recommendations To Programmers And Companies?

Always listen to your users. They will help you create the product they will want to use.


**** thanks from Mr Colby Palmer for take Part in my interview****

If you made an interview with a programmer or technology master, please notify me by leave a comment…

Best Luck!

(Source: http://theFastPerfectionist.Blogspot.com )