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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein
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Tue Dec 9 8:30 am, 2008
In my brief period of owning a console (I may yet get a wii, but I prefer PC games), the only game I really liked was Katamari Damacy. I liked it the same reason everyone else did, people just like to collect stuff, people like to roll stuff up into a gigantic ball for some reason. People do this all day long. And programmers are asked to figure out what's in the katamari. First, make a group of all the green things. Then make a group of all the sharp things. Then, make another group of the things not in the first two groups, but which can be both green and sharp. Now, paginate them each, and when being looked at only on the Moon replace 'green' with 'red'. And this has to happen while the katamari is growing larger and larger, with more and more things and more kinds of things. "Don't worry about airplanes, we don't come across those often at all. But they're green. Sometimes red." And when I'm working on cataloging someone's katamari I always hear this song in my head... (naaaa, na na na na na-na na na na)
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Tue Nov 11 7:30 pm, 2008
Back when I used to do tech support, I was trying hard to get people off of Internet Explorer, there were a couple options even then -- but I kept having this conversation:
- I don't want to use Netscape/Opera/Mozilla, Internet Explorer is perfect.
- And how many other browsers have you used before?
- Well, I haven't used any others, but IE is perfect.
I also had this conversation about word processors (remember them?), and OS's. It was extremely hard to get anyone to look at Linux as a server with MS and Sun around. The conversations always went like:
- I don't want to use another X, this X is perfect.
- And how many other kinds of X have you used?
- Well, I haven't used any others. But this one is perfect.
Google does some things really well, obviously. Which is probably why companies are switching over their mail, their ad serving, some of their web applications, their project management, their collaborative word processing, and their code repositories to Google. What worries me about this is that somewhere down the line, folks are going to forget anything else was possible, that "this one is perfect". It's not going to be now, but maybe years from now, when you realize that you've become Google's bitch. It will be the folks that come after the people who made the decision to switch off of Exchange Server, who have used little else but Google for their mail, search, projects. What frightens me honestly, is the return of old fashioned monoculture, while Google currently feels like little companies grouped together under a brand, there's an unprecedented level of trust in the word 'Google' that gives me shivers. -
Sat Nov 8 11:58 am, 2008
I once had a Steve-Jobs-Type classic A-personality boss toward the end of the dotcom era who would always tell our team that we were one day going to be the equivalent of plumbers and mechanics (he also had the unfortunate power to make women who worked for him cry almost on cue). I didn't disagree with him, but asked what he had against plumbers and mechanics? Why was this a thing we should, apparently, be frightened of? Who makes and or fixes your shit? Who makes your car run? Where would you be without these folks? I think of Douglas Adams B-Ark, which held a world's middle managers, TV producers, consultants (and phone sanitizers) tricked to be sent off alone to crash on a prehistoric earth. The fictional A-Ark held the world's leaders and thinkers, and C-Ark held the people who made things, the plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, computer programmers, farmers. I'm quite happy to be on the C-Ark.
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Fri Nov 7 8:30 am, 2008
"I am thinking about something much more important than bombs.
I am thinking about computers." -- John von Neuman, 1946, -
Mon Oct 27 9:28 pm, 2008
Garrett Lisi first got some attention a couple years ago with an interesting idea about unified field theory and the mathematical entity known as E8. Recently I read a book called Symmetry And The Monster about Lie Groups the creation of the Atlas, and E8. Not that well written (always saying 'and later we'll get back to that' and never do), but incredibly interesting subject. And I will never be able to do the math. Ever. But the concepts, maybe... Although it might be more like the Bohr quote If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them. -
Sun Oct 12 7:10 pm, 2008
Recently I'd started using Coda, which is a nice web editor, which smartly combines tabs, nav, and a good layout (I can't stand tons of little windows hanging around while I work on my mac, yes you Adobe). But the problem was, as good as Coda is, I could only use it on my mac and I'm on other machines. A lot. So what could I use that lives on all my machines, by default, and probably any other that I have to jump on, and not necessarily need a windowing environ? At that point, facepalm: Emacs. I've been using that program for years. Decades? Not quite decades yet. It's Emacs for Christs' sake. I'm on Emacs every day, so why did I get distracted by some new editor? You harlot, you slut. Procrastination, I think is the proper answer. Like my previous post about the box of wires, sometimes the same thing happens with software -- you just collect software you use a couple times, enjoy poking around with, but which in the long run you don't use. It's just clutter. Instead, if I'd taken the same amount of time to improve my emacs-fu: how often do I use etags, bookmarks, macros? I've poked around these, but I don't really use them. nxml mode? Ediff? Emacs and subversion? Jesus, pwsafe and emacs? There are oodles of possibly helpful things I don't regularly use in Emacs. It's old, it's solid, it's everywhere, it has the skills to pay the bills. You take your fancy new things with shiny buttons and go away now.
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Mon Oct 6 10:55 pm, 2008
...sometimes sharp, tangled, mostly useless old wires. It was not my intention to spend hours digging through an ancient box of wires, but after a decade or two, and stubbing my toe on it, suddenly that became my intention. Maybe it's half a life of reading brutal Zen koans, but I just wanted to purge all the tangled wires and get to some kind of pure wire minimal existence.
It could have been worse, early in the 00's I untangled most of it, and twist-tied some of it, although I don't recall actually throwing anything out. You never know when you'll need a serial-to-alien-device adapter. I couldn't take that final step, getting rid of a hundred audio connectors I'll never use.
What amazed me were how many items (dozens and dozens?) were telephony. Phone cables, modem cables, modems -- all screaming out how desperately difficult it seemed to be to stay connected before the era of the dedicated home connection. I had a modem card for a Zaurus 5500 -- was I planning on dialing in somewhere behind the Iron Curtain? And before the ubiquity of USB, marveled at how many insane cables you needed. I had several 20 foot parallel cables. Why? Was I setting up an office of printers for some kind of subversive Zine resurgence movement? And why did I have a CF to PC card adapter? What was I adapting? I don't even recall why or how I bought it at this point. It's like a relic of momentary gadget insanity.
The rest of the box seemed to be filters and converters. I had more European power plugs than times I'd been to Europe. They clustered together, strangely, aside from the tired wires, like they were frightened or conspiring. They just didn't seem to want to be thrown out, and I kept dropping them as I tried to shovel them into a C-Town plastic bag. And power converters -- have you noticed that power converters have gotten much smaller? I had converters there which must've weighed several pounds. I didn't even think about alternate uses in this box-o-wire purge, I'm not gonna use the converter as a paper weight, I'm not gonna build robots out of the old cd player, I'm not going to use the modems (I in fact don't even have a phone line) time for it all to go.
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Sat Sep 20 8:30 am, 2008
Claire Miller at the NYTimes reminds us: "How many more new social networking or micro-blogging or video-sharing site can one person use?". I've wondered when, like the lending bubble, the social networking bubble is going to burst -- seemingly every tech department on the planet over the last few years seem to be focusing on building community, social, and micro-status type web applications. The thought of logging on to facebook, myspace, twitter, pownce, etc., etc., (multiply this by N attendees at the web 2.0 conference) every single day is daunting. There just aren't enough hours to follow and post that much. So does this become like magazines did in the 90's? Magazines became focused on catering to smaller specific groups, magazines almost all became trade magazines, stabilizing circulation for a while but killing growth or innovation. Twitter, whom I respect but don't use, even has a blurb on their homepage "When I first started doing it, I thought, 'geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking', but now I'm glad I did it." So in answer to the question "Wanna Be A Member" I say, yes, sure, but crap, sorry, no time left in the day. So will the desire to 'micro-blog' your every thought and movement be so overwhelming that an industry grows up around automatically monitoring and posting everytime you buy a bran muffin? Will humans begin evolving to a super-caffeinated non-sleep creature 100% in self-promotion content-creation mode for an audience of 500 followers? In a decentralized community each member is at liberty, or encouraged, to believe they are the center, and that certainly is a strange kind of new Me generation.
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Mon Sep 1 10:09 pm, 2008
I played games all weekend. Not video games. Old fashioned board games. Maybe not old fashioned, the board game biz is better than ever with some fantastic games for (mostly) grown ups, like the Klaus Teuber games, Rio Grande games, Munchkin, or even some of the older Steve Jackson games. And when I play these, especially new games I haven't played before, sometimes I feel like the lone programmer stuck in an editorial meeting. I dislike lots of disparate rules that go together in a seemingly arbitrary manner: "You mean everything works like X until you have the little plastic guy with the bag of gold in his hand on the blue spot on turn 6 and there's a ship in the market spot? And someone happens to have card Y? But not for you because you have the Pope hat?". It's like having an editor design the database model for a CMS: everything becomes special, hence there are no longer large generally applicable laws. I can't just sit there without becoming preoccupied about how to make it less complex, and get annoyed when those special cases come up. I really like games with few very simple rules that can chain together, allowing possibility without special case restraints. X does Y, without exception, now see the permutations that happen with real people and actual cases. What also drives me nuts a bit are games that become about collection -- whether that's a collectable game like Magic (aka Hassle The Dorkening) or a resource hoarding game about who can make the most money. General rules games don't devolve into small patterns, since they're general, there are larger possible outcomes, and more interesting I think. Chess does this, Risk does this, Poker does, and Settlers Of Catan does this to some extent -- although there are a ton of knockoffs that fail to reproduce what that game got right it seems. When it comes down to it, I like the final Munchkin rule the best: "When the cards disagree with the rules, follow the cards. Any other disputes should be settled by loud arguments among the players, with the owner of the game having the last word."
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Sat Aug 30 12:05 pm, 2008
Jquery's recent redesign started a shit storm on their boards -- the main criticism being against the top hompage graphic which read (before it was promptly removed) "Be a javascript ROCKSTAR". The central complaint was that this portrayed a large degree of unprofessionalism, and that people trying to get their bosses or work places to adopt jquery would be put off. Which I agree with 100%. The design is pretty canned, and the illustration pretty cheezy -- but it brings up a good question, when does your open source community supported project become something that's expected to be professional. I can't believe Resig would not understand how really widespread and well used jquery is at this point, is his project no longer his really, is it directed more by the users? I remember a time when these branding, marketing and design expectations didn't exist for free/open software. Start with Tux, the linux logo -- or the Python site just a couple years ago, which was redesigned successfully. There are still plenty of older well used projects that have very bad sites, but there is a difference, these were very clearly not trying to look good, they were often merely utilitarian, whereas the jquery redesign seems trying to be clever or savvy (it's neither). And while I agree the redesign didn't look great, and the graphic unprofessional, it is notable this is now an era where free/open software are expected by its users to be shown professionally to non-technical people, and that presentation is now as important as the code itself.
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Sssh I'm Busy Being Distracted
Tue Aug 12 8:30 am, 2008
Pigeonholing mental activity is like a back-slapping slot machine -- 'You're this way' or 'I'm part of this group' etc. There are few terms I dislike more than 'polymath' or its more derogatory partner 'ADD'. Just a guess, but people's interests have varied greatly over a great deal of time, and these sort of terms get overused for standard behavior. I imagine Grog the cave man losing interest in cave painting and moving on to weaving, thus answering age old questions from historians "who painted this and why?" from Grog as "(shrug) I dunno I was totally into cave painting for like, a couple years maybe". It seems like everyone is concerned about whether they're a specialist or a generalist, about lack of focus, about distraction. In the past few months there have been big stories about technology, that amount of media produced and its searchability is making us stupid, that the pace of communication is, say, akin to driving drunk. Perhaps one of the problems here is that we're all making comparisons between ourselves and our tools, that our behavior is unrealistically expected to be ordered, laser-like, systematic, sortable by alpha in row 1. It's not, never has been. Are there too many distractions, too much media, frivolous communication too easy, etc.? Sure, but you know, you can usually control your environment (one of the upsides of having the very tools that are claimed to cause the problems) and with a little bit of practice actually use the things around you productively. What may not have changed is the education to do so -- teach not only how to read, but how to make time to read properly. I'm going to schedule time now to become distracted and enjoy it.
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Sat Aug 2 7:42 pm, 2008
I do not share his openness to "total transparency", some of the well-trod concepts he hits can be taken as dystopian (but I don't think he's fundamentally wrong). "Total Transparency" to me often speaks of "total dependency" and the removal of the previous concept of the individual, which I'm a little bit attached to. You are what network, organization, or node you choose or, through circumstance, do not choose to become attached to. In a sense what he describes is an informatics caste system, which is why I tend to like Neal Stephenson's slang 'Vicky' for a neo-Victorian 'Phyle'. -
Tue Jul 29 9:32 pm, 2008
I'm not an Apple fanboy. I do own a macbook, and I'm very pleased with it -- both the hardware and the OS are really very good. The OS, at least, is several magnitudes better than Microsoft's, and a step above most Linux distros in ease of use (but not in flexibility or 'freedom'*). I have an iPod, I bought several years ago, it is currently in a dock on top my stereo, I almost never unhook it. Apple is a great company, they generally make great products, and they certainly have a great sense of style (and an even better spin for marketing). But I'm not a fanboy, if they went away tomorrow I'd just load up another OS, without blinking or regret.
I remember the bad old days. I remember Apple taking away the command line, I remember really bad clones and an even worse OS. OK, I'm like an old depression-era grandfather, who remembers having to work with a trash-80, and remembers fondly the failings of the Amiga, and isn't ready to let any one OS become a reliance. Things change, in tech, more so and more often. Acknowledging that Jobs took care of the ugly 90's things, I still am skeptical that they can ever properly do a web app. Do they want to try and be Google? Oh, I see, they want to get on the cloud bandwagon where all your device and app data is available from anywhere.
And that is a good bandwagon to be on, who doesn't want that? I want my email, bookmarks, addressbook, passwords, netflix recommendations, etc., reachable at all times. But apparently Apple borked it, borked their MobileMe. John Markoff writes up the problems over at NYTimes (always take his word as a grain of salt). My slight pleasure in Apple's misfortunes stems from my belief that the majority is always wrong (and the other half of that Ibsen quote, "the minority is rarely right"). But I am an appropriate reactionary: if it's not cool to dis Apple, then by God, it's time to dis Apple a little just to kept their ego from getting galaxy-sized.
* Please, don't let this digress into that discussion. -
Wed Jul 23 5:30 am, 2008
With recent years of focus on simpler, useful (that dislikeable marketable term "green") engineering, a return to referencing Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful seems natural. It's not exactly anti-globalization riots in the street, but it's likely in the back pockets of those who do. Declaring that appropriate technology has less to do with capitalism and more to do with labor-saving, with respect for economical, ethical and cultural aspects might not win bankers wallets, but instead actual lives. This month Popular Mechanics has a good article on MIT's Amy Smith who helped co-found D-Lab. Wired did a writeup in 2004 as well, TED has a video. OK, so now if you feel like as much of a loser as I do for spending the day mucking around with code and reading Fark, then, congrats, welcome to the 21st century white-guy-industrialized-nation-guilt-club.
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Tue Jul 22 8:30 am, 2008
I'm reminded of a Von Braun story in the news yesterday about NASA's troubled Ares program and the skunk works by engineers to make something better, or more appropriate. From Henry Spencer's blog:
The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work. But the rockets didn't see any of this: their development went forward pretty much in a straight line, hewing closely to the original designs. Why?
The key difference was Wernher von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center (then as now, NASA's rocket-development centre). Early in Apollo, he met with the crew capsule people to get their final decision on how much the Apollo spacecraft was going to weigh. They told him that the final number, including all margins, was 75,000 pounds (34 tonnes). The Apollo spacecraft definitely would weigh no more than that.
And he quietly decided that he simply didn't believe them.
He'd seen their weight estimates growing by the month, and he simply didn't believe that this one wouldn't grow too. So he went back to Marshall and told his team that the real requirement was 85,000 pounds (39 tonnes). He later raised that number still further. As it finally turned out, the Apollo 11 spacecraft weighed roughly 100,000 pounds (45 tonnes). The only reason that Apollo flew on schedule was that von Braun had been so cautious.
How many times have you been put in a similar position? (Of course not with anything as complex or important as rockets.) This isn't premature optimization, this is good old fashioned CYA. I'm not sure if Sloan teaches this 'technique', but I have found it to be invaluable. -
Thou Shall Always Have A Working Version
Mon Jul 14 11:58 am, 2008
While most people seem to have an intricate relative scale of morality, based more or less on Judeo-Christian beliefs, arguably a Hedonistic Calculus -- I in fact have something simpler. So, "thou shall not kill", "You shall not covet your neighbor's house", etc., fine, works for you. All I need is this:
At the end of each coding session, have a working version
If code is to be committed, it means including the time for testing. You'll always have something working as well as the previous day, if not, hopefully better, to show. Doesn't mean there won't be bugs somewhere down the line, but at least there's been a check and double check (and usually a triple check because I don't trust the first two cases). Now this might seem obvious to you -- why would you commit something you haven't tested? How could you be so confident that just by looking at something it's perfect? If you aren't sure, don't commit. Better not to commit at all than to wreck a version, especially a production version. Although, like most commandments, which if followed would make the world a vastly better place, this one is almost universally ignored. -
Fri Jul 11 10:30 pm, 2008
I'm not gonna lie, any site that requires oodles of resources and a cinema display is not near and dear to my heart. I find some comfort in that devices are getting smaller, and people's "surfing" habits (as a general term for all the things that used to be web and now encompass texting, geolocation, photo taking, etc.) is becoming less "golly I'm sitting down looking at the world wide web" and finally transparent. Why this is encouraging to me is that it takes away from what has become somewhat bloated direction of the web and brings it back to a direction more about delivering content. I don't care what font you're using. I don't care if things move or fade. I don't care if corners are rounded and buttons shiny. I don't care if there's a slider ajaxing in pretty photos. Even saying this is anathema to modern 2.bla web philosophy. Not that it can't look nice, certainly one of the things the iPhone and eeepc have done is bring some desktop web standards to truly portable devices. But because these devices have a mobile purpose, you're on a smaller space, your connection may be slower (or lots slower) the interface tends to be more lean as your exterior space tends to grow or be less consistent. You want to get what you need quicker, and without less padding. This means, in so many words, removing some crap. And good riddance I say, all I want is great content.
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Wed Jun 25 1:33 pm, 2008
"Correlation supersedes causation" claims Chris Anderson at Wired. He tries to make the case that a Google world collects so much data that former scientific methods of "hypothesize, model, test" are obsolete in the face of staggering amounts of processed information. This sort of Kurtweilish sci-fi idea, that reality might suddenly change and pull the rug out from under hundreds of years of experience and operate on entirely different principles, might be entertaining but hardly the idea itself is going to kill the need for humans to require and seek causation. What about all those big beautiful generalizing ideas, the kind of Newtonian ideas, the quaint ideas of taxonomy in the 19th century, or the predictive power of Einstein's ideas made before he had the data to back them up. In the bizarro universe this reversal becomes true, scientific progress rests in the hands of the data collectors rather than the scientists (or who knows, maybe they too will become obsolete). Google is another company, as good as they might be at doing some things, I don't see -- hope not to see -- a Google world where science mysteriously disappears for mere data collection. My bet is, not happening.
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DPI Gear Doesn't Throttle Connections, People With DPI Gear Throttle Connections
Tue Jun 24 9:50 pm, 2008
Or so Caputo's arguement goes. It's an old argument used to justify behavior that a large part of the population finds disagreeable or immoral. Caputo sounds like he's rationalizing. A tiered internet makes a large technorati, inventive, population used to having all the bandwidth they agreed to pay for phased out into cable-like service plans extremely grumpy and less creative. I imagine a tiered internet operating the same way as cable tv: mysteriously ever-increasing monthly bills, terrible content, terrible service and very little ability to use it for what you want. Connection monitoring necessary? Yes. Throttling connections doing p2p or turning a connection into a subscription like package? I hope not. Caputo: It could evolve in a way where people provide services where they say these applications are optimized on this tier and these applications are not optimized on this tier. In fact, let's look at the Amazon Kindle. It's a little e-book where you don't pay a monthly subscription but every time you buy a book, you pay either $9.99 or $5.99. It doesn't take too much imagination to understand that it's a computer and it's using the internet to deliver [books], yet there's no monthly subscription fee. So how does that work? You pay Amazon, and Amazon pays the service provider right then and there for providing [the content]… Is that a different network? People don't think of it that way. It's an internet that only delivers books that you buy and newspapers that you subscribe to. People won't call it a separate internet, but here's a device that only does this. I don't want an internet that turns into a thousand kindles. I want a big pipe and decide what I want to do with it.
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George Dyson: The birth of the computer
Sun Jun 22 12:10 pm, 2008
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Thu Jun 19 11:08 pm, 2008
Hot on the heels of an NyTimes piece on the Dymaxion car, channel 13 airs a decent piece on Bucky. Buckminster Fuller, an imperfect engineer who believed in change, and science as social transformation, had his flaws no doubt, but I can't help but find those ideas he did dwell on as unique and radical and truly genius. I'm not sure it's fashionable to like Bucky anymore (since he does seem to have fashionable periods), not sure I care. Wouldn't mind going back in time to have one of those classes at Black Mountain College in the rough.
