One week ago I received an email from the most successful online store owned by Bezos, telling me that since my site didn’t earn any money in the last 365 days, my affiliation program was terminated. Within a week I had to remove all references to their website from my blog.

Here is the text of the communication:

Il tuo account da affiliato verrà chiuso con effetto entro il termine di sette giorni, entro lo stesso termine terminerà anche l’ Accordo Operativo che lo regola.

Nota – Questa comunicazione riguarda solo l’account elencato nella riga dell’oggetto di questa email.

Perché questa comunicazione?
Perché non sono state effettuate vendite tramite link di affiliazione negli ultimi 365 giorni.

Cosa accade ora?
Dovrai terminare l’utilizzo di ogni contenuto e marchio *m*zon e rimuovere immediatamente tutti i link diretti al sito di *m*zon. Riceverai tuttavia il pagamento per ogni commissione ancora da pagare guadagnata precedentemente a questa comunicazione.

Ti invitiamo tuttavia a candidarti nuovamente in futuro visitando la pagina: https://programma-affiliazione.*m*zon.it.

Ti ringraziamo per la partecipazione al Programma di Affiliazione di *m*zon EU.

*m*zon.it

I sent them two emails, one to the Italian branch and the other to the US headquarters, stating that mine is not an e-commerce website and my affiliation is more a service to my readers to look up books and/or movies if they are interested (in fact is far more than 365 that referral fees sum up to 0). Despite the claim of a reply in less than 24h I got no response.

Basically, I don’t understand why they have to behave like this, the traffic from my website costs them zero. Also, any traffic that would arrive there could be a potential purchase (this is more up to them to be good at marketing on their website). But also it piss me off that I have to remove all links to their website – I had to go through the database of my website (15 years of posts) and manually replace references. And why? Shouldn’t I be free to link anyone I want to link?

So I decided that *m*zn is history, time to look elsewhere. I would like to join the affiliation program of ibs, but I still have some trouble with their affiliation service tradedoubler.

Here we go again, another system written in one of the advanced languages that promise to avoid you the burden of memory management, another unavoidable performance issue and yet again another desperate run to move everything out of garbage man hands into a set of dedicated memory pools.

According to Wikipedia, GC (Garbage Collection) was invented back at the dawn of computer science, (ca 1959) for the LISP language. Since its inception, GC made promptly clear that it didn’t play well with time constraints (see Humorous Annedoct in History of Lisp).

One of the (many?) shortcomings of Java is, at least in my humble opinion, the lack of unsigned integers. This may seem a minor problem, but it becomes a real annoyance when you have to deal with bits and bytes.

Consider the right shift. As a good C/C++ programmer you know that right shifting of a signed integer is generally bad. Java defined two bit-wise right shift operators: >> and >>>. The first extends the sign, so that -2 >> 1 evaluates to -1 and -2 >>> 1 evaluates to (-1 & 0x7FFFFFFF), i.e. the left most bit that becomes vacant pending the shift is filled with a 0.

So far, so good. So you may be surprised from the result of the following code:

class Surprise
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        int result = -1 >>> 32;
        System.out.println( "surprise: "+result );
    }
}

I don’t want to spoil the result, so you may want to take some more time to think… Ready with your guess?

Well Suprise.java prints -1. That’s because the right hand side argument of the >>> operator is masked implicitly by 0x1F (i.e. taking values just between 0 and 31 included).

No warning is emitted during compilation, so you are pretty on your own – either you know or you don’t and trouble are ready to … byte you.

Here now and then, as a programmer, you have a hard time finding a good name for something. That thingy thing that eludes your wit and skill to name things. And that’s bad because it is hard to reason about unnamed entities. Symbols are deeply embedded in our brainwork and the right word has quite a power to drive thoughts efficiently and reliably.