How To Build A Scheme

Tutorial (in Haskell).

Weird Quicksilver / Finder Boot Bug

I just saw, on Quicksilver's autolaunch, not the usual "QS" but instead a version of the Finder logo which was done in shades of red instead of blue. Haven't been able to find any reports of this via Google, though.

Rough Conference Schedules

Attention stalkers! Want to follow me around? Here's your chance!

Approximate RailsConf Schedule
Approximate OSCON Schedule

Yay!

Rails On The Desktop

When I realized how Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets work, my first question was "does this mean you could build a desktop app in Rails?"

The idea at the time was met with skepticism, but since then there have been three indicators that this is in fact a very genuine future possibility:

Joyent Slingshot
Evan Weaver's upcoming RailsConf presentation
Clairify (thanks to Apollo and RubyAMF)

And of course at least one Rails application which, though technically a Web app, seems to be generally run as a desktop app by most of its users:

Tracks

Way back in the 80s, when computer manufacturers started putting copy protection on their floppy drives, this was seen as a betrayal by geeks, many of whom believed the whole point was being able to customize software to your needs and take it apart for your edification. It could be that their ideal is going to be expressed anyway. If writing desktop apps is easy, people will do it.

Curious to see how this develops. (And, honestly, if it develops.)

By the way, speaking of OS X Dashboard widgets, there's one for RDoc which you can use as-is or point directly at the Rails documentation.

Can't Make It To RailsConf?

Here's an interesting alternative.

Speaking at OSCON!

Very excited. Looks like I'll have to put some work in!

Come check it out!

My presentation will be based on my "HREF Considered Harmful" screencast about Seaside and Rails. I'm hoping to talk a little also about Web frameworks inspired by Seaside, such as Jifty and Phaux.

Caveat Emptor

Thousands of Japanese have been swindled in a scam in which they were sold Australian and British sheep and told they were poodles.

...

The scam was uncovered when Japanese movie star Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

She was crestfallen when told it was a sheep.

MindMeister And Choosing Software Projects

MindMeister is a mind-mapping Web 2.0 app in private beta. It's really an astounding example of what's possible today in a Web 2.0 GUI with Ajax, Scriptaculous, Prototype, and JavaScript in general. It's easily competitive with all but the flashiest mind-mapping software for Java or the desktop.

However, although mind-mapping has some great proponents, I personally don't get a ton of use out of it, so my first thought when I saw this was that this is the type of project which loses tons of money but is great for the programmer's career. It doesn't seem particularly useful, yet the actual code is extremely cutting-edge. The company might tank but your resume will look great. My attitude with this kind of project, in the past, was generally "take the money and run."

Unfortunately, that attitude is a pretty bad attitude. The dot-com downturn was pretty much caused by a "take the money and run" mentality, and provided a very stark demonstration that you can only run so far. So my next thought, upon seeing this, was that it was good code, but it might be bad karma.

Far from it. It turns out MindMeister is a project of a services/consulting business called Codemart. If you're in a services business, demonstrating that you can do work of this level is a great marketing move. This is basically "calling card" software - a fantastic way to get new customers.

I'm a fan of 37 Signals. The company began as a Web design firm, which is to say, a services business. I think there's a very strong possibility that their Web apps began as calling card software before becoming self-sustaining. This is one of the overlooked reasons that the Getting Real approach to Web apps is such a good idea: your best-case scenario is a self-sustaining business, and your worst-case scenario is a great calling card.

The old-school venture capital model gave you a best-case scenario of a gazillion dollars, and a worst-case scenario of total unemployment. I know that rollercoaster is fun, but only at the top; the bottom is pretty lame. But more importantly, what's really going on here is the difference between possible outcomes. With VC, you either win big or lose big; with Getting Real, you either win big or win small. But either way, you win.

Last year a few people were saying that another boom was on the way, and a lot of people were saying that companies like 37 Signals and Adaptive Path were the real future - companies with high standards of quality and great business sense, that could do excellent, innovative work, even during the bust. A few high-profile VC cashouts later, everything's different.

Business and technology are as subject to fashion as anything else, and sometimes I feel the lure of startups too, but I think it's pretty important to remember that the core difference between the Getting Real model and the startup model is that possible outcomes thing. A strategy where you might win big, but you probably won't, is inferior to a strategy where you're guaranteed to win and the only question is how much.

On the other hand, the inferior strategy is sometimes more fun.

Super Mario Brothers: Winning Strategy

Psycho Crusher FTW

High Fidelity First-Class Travelling Set

And you thought the Google jet was embarassing.

Five Kinds of Awesome

Awesome Seaside-inspired Web framework
Awesome human social rhythms
Awesome anal retentiveness
Awesome skill-stretching
Awesome planet named after me by admiring dyslexic

When The Beast Was Born

I realized something interesting today. It's very specific to my own circumstances, but it might be useful to consider anyway.

I'm a programmer, and I'm in acting classes. Other programmers wonder if I'm trying to do some weird career change, and some even seem to think I'm "up to something" - social skills being seriosuly undervalued in programming, almost to the point of suspicion. The people in my acting classes ask me if I work at Urban Outfitters, and while this wouldn't be a flattering question among geeks, I can't be insulted, because there are very talented people in my acting classes who do work at Urban Outfitters, and no disrespect is ever intended.



The result of this is a minor identity crisis. Am I a programmer who studies acting because it makes giving presentations easy? Or am I an aspiring actor who somehow developed an entire career as a computer programmer (of all things!) before I discovered my true calling?

The uncertainty is amplified because one of the very few commonalities these very different fields share is that passion is necessary. Not just because you have to be passionate about either one of these things to be good at them. Also because both job markets have absurd dips and peaks. Nobody sane is doing either of these things just for the money.

Everybody knows this is true of acting; however, people are used to the idea that programming is a steady job. Don't count on it. Go back in time to 2002 and try telling that to people. Anybody who got into programming for the job security needs to seriously reconsider that strategy. The dot-com downturn sent legions of programmers back to their moms' basements. It's true that there's going to be more and more programming work in the future, as every last little thing from your refrigerator to your shoe gets an IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean the work will pay well at all.



The popularity of this idea that programming leads to riches comes and goes with booms and busts, and that cyclical rhythm in and of itself should be a kind of wake-up call. Sometimes your services are in fashion and sometimes they aren't. The image of the struggling actor waiting tables is so burned into our culture I can't even guess when it first originated, but if the image of the struggling programmer waiting tables ever becomes an established cliche, I can tell you with confidence, it'll have started in 1997 and gained serious credibility in 2001.



So here I am. Am I an aspiring actor? Am I a programmer? What's the deal? I realized the answer today. The answer's actually real simple.

I'm a science fiction screenwriter who does way too much research.

Seriously. I spent so much time researching the Internet that I actually forgot the point was research in the first place - but that is in fact what got me started. What's the best way to find out what changes are really going to happen? Simple. Bet your ability to eat, for several years running, on which technologies you learn. After a while you get a pretty good intuition for that kind of thing. And likewise - the best way to write a screenplay? Learn to act!

But that still doesn't explain it all, so I should probably add that I'm also an egomaniac who enjoys math for its own sake. OK - maybe this is too much about me to be useful for anybody else. Maybe my psychology is kind of odd. But there's a story here. Stick with me.



I got into programming because of zines - specifically Mondo 2000, Fringeware Review, Wired, bOING bOING (in a very different, earlier incarnation), and of course the weird, incredible, wonderful Schwa (which I almost sorta wrote for). These zines chronicled the emerging "cyberculture," this new sci-fi movement that was going to change the world. At the time, Wired was a very different thing than it's since become. Wired didn't publish e-mail addresses in its first issue, and it didn't feature business leaders in its first year. If you were reading Wired back when it was new enough that the rawer, more street-level Fringeware could do a parody called Weird - and mean it sincerely, as the compliment it was at the time - then you know, the first issues of Wired put science fiction novelists on its covers. They got to do huge articles about the future, too. Business leaders were in the mix, but initially, they were not the focus.



A few years later, all the other zines were gone, and Wired had gotten as boring as fuck. You never saw anything but business guys and Rollerblade ads in Wired. I had moved to San Francisco to change the world. Instead I was working for a bank. Admittedly, I was working for an investment bank, in a situation with responsibility and where my programming skills were highly valued, but still, ultimately, I was working for a bank. I was making good money but my soul was dead. I might as well have been a zombie.



When the dot-com downturn hit, I was thrilled. I knew I'd be fired. And one day my manager called me into his office.

"We're going to have to start firing all the contractors," he said.

"Ah," I said. "Well, that's regrettable, but in the current economic climate, it's no shock."

(And it wasn't. Two hundred thousand jobs were lost in January 2001 in the city of San Francisco alone.)

"That's right," my manager said. "So we want you to come on full-time."

I told him I'd think about it, and pretty soon I was driving off to live in a forest in New Mexico and learn how to draw.



It's pretty fucking hard to draw a human hand, by the way. Just so you know. Seriously. Try it sometime. And don't complain. I warned you I was an egomaniac.

But enough about that.

Why is this story allegedly useful?

It's useful first because I've met programmers working on interesting things who clearly think I should be more excited about the projects they're working on than I am - especially when these are also projects which potential clients are offering me. If you're one of those programmers, cheer up. It doesn't mean your project's not fascinating. There is just nothing happening on the Web today that is anywhere near as exciting as the experience of telling people that there's this thing called the World-Wide Web and it's awesome and you should totally get into it. Nothing happening today as fun as arguing with staid business types that advertizing will one day become a big part of the Web. Nothing as high-stakes as moving across the country to a strange city on nothing but a few hundred dollars and your absolute, total faith that you've spotted something that will soon grow huge.

It's useful second because sometimes living in a forest and drawing is awesome.



And if that's true, you have to wonder: is there a way in which working at Urban Outfitters could be awesome too? There is. I've seen it. I saw an actress today doing incredibly fearless work. To pay the bills, she works as a waitress. She's awesome.

It's useful third because programming is looking more and more like acting or screenwriting every day. The entry costs are approaching zero and the value of education is only partial. And certainly the show biz adage that "you're only as good as your latest hit" is true in programming as well. Ask anybody who lost a job to a younger programmer with less brains but trendier skills. So if you're a programmer and you're making money, save some of that money. And take time to keep your skills absurdly sharp. And study business, too, because it's only the great businesspeople who really make money as programmers.

It's useful fourth, and most of all, because if you're choosing between projects, you might think it's because you're brilliant, but it's not. In a very small number of cases it's because you're brilliant, and the economy's doing well; in most cases, it's because the economy is doing well. And when you're choosing between projects, you should absolutely choose the projects which excite you. The reason is simple. Hard work, risk-taking, and talent are the ingredients for a successful career in both acting and programming, and passion's necessary in either case.

But at the same time, just as an actor who wants to succeed should balance artsy "cinema" with popcorn flicks, every programmer should balance programming for money with programming for programming.

Economics 101 for Web 2.0+

I've been holding back this outburst since the late 90s. But today I read something that made me lose my patience. Jeff Atwood has a roundup of blogs addressing the question, where are all the open-source billionaires?

Jeff's post is a good post, and he provides a much calmer and nicer answer than I'm about to, but I don't have his vast reserves of patience. That is the stupidest question in the world. Where are all the air billionaires? Where are all the gravity billionaires? What about the light billionaires? Huh? Huh? Where are they? Tell me! If light is so damn useful, why hasn't anyone been able to license the sun? It must not be worth anything!

Wow. Good point there, Einstein.

The motivator for open source contributions isn't usually economic. It could be, in the case of somebody who wants to raise their profile by making open source contributions, but most open source doesn't come from such a mercenary point of view. People contribute to open source projects because they like working with good software. Open source contributions make software better, and keep good software alive.

The economic effect of this is the same effect any continuous trend of innovation and improvement has: it makes excellence cheaper, and thereby more commonplace. That's a paradox, but there can be enormous power in paradox. Look at the iPod; there's great money in making excellence commonplace. But the iPod isn't open source. The money's in the service you provide or the way you leverage existing resources.

This is why you should never, ever accept equity from a company that doesn't have a firm economic reason for its anticipated success. Amazon undercut the operating costs of Borders and Barnes & Noble; Google introduced a superior pricing model and superior performance metrics to advertizing; eBay leveraged the economic value of existing assets that was being blocked by normal sales channels and enabled prices to become more fluid in the process. Web success stories that don't have firm economic underpinnings are gambling winnings. Web stories like Amazon, Google, and eBay can all easily be explained afterwards by an economist.

The same is true for open source. Imagine if real estate suddenly became free. You wouldn't have to spend as much time apartment-hunting; a huge chunk of everybody's budget would suddenly be freed. What would you do with all that extra money and all that extra time? How different would moving to a new city be? How different would it be to open a new restaurant? Would anyone ever pay for parking again in their lives? That's open source: a massive economic disruption which transforms industries permanently.

Open source, sooner or later, is going to spell doom for venture capital. Your infrastructure costs, your development costs, all these things shrink to near zero. Building a Web app, these days, is like writing or drawing. All you really need to write something brilliant is pencil and paper. All you really need to draw something beautiful is a pencil and paper too. You can't build Web apps with a pencil and paper, but open source has made the startup costs almost that low. If you can get on a computer connected to the Internet, you can build a Web app.

With Amazon, Google, and eBay, you're looking at companies which made a lot of money by freeing up money which had been trapped in the market inefficiencies of old systems. That's the key; these systems dramatically improved the efficiency of existing industries. In the case of travel agencies, the inefficiencies were so strong they supported an entire sub-industry - travel agents - which the Internet has almost completely destroyed. It's usually not about new goods or services; it's usually about optimizing infrastructure.

Open source is a huge infrastructure optimization. It frees up money also, but it doesn't make money in the process. That's because there's a huge difference between generating new wealth and generating new concentrations of wealth. Asking where the open source billionaries are is like pointing to the French Revolution and saying, "If democracy is such a good idea, how come France doesn't have any more kings?" Because the kings were the problem.

What the mighty king Bill Gates contributed to the economy was a series of traps, dead-ends, and strategic victories that leveraged market inefficiences in distribution and manufacturing into a virtual monopoly. Microsoft was always pushing inferior software, even in their heyday. The Reagan soundbite "A rising tide lifts all ships" only actually applies when that rising tide hasn't already been trapped and channelled before it even rose by a massive complex of dams and reservoirs. If you can funnel the tide to one ship, and your walls are high enough, the tide can keep rising forever with only one ship being lifted. Open source erodes those walls.

And that isn't the only reason that "Where are all the open source billionaires?" is a stupid question. The other reason is, as Jeff points out, they're at Google. And Amazon.

How To Spot An Idiot

You: "What's the most interesting change on the Web since 2000?"

Idiot: "Ajax."

Smart Person: "Bayes nets."

The next change that we will see with machine learning is the ability to classify people.

American Obesity And Subsidized Agriculture

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year.

Might And Glory

The Cave

Wait a minute guys. I've been here before. When the monster got me. And I barely survived. We're in the monster's cave!



Seriously, this is one reason I'm glad I live in Los Angeles. This might be a boom, as opposed to a bubble, but either way, the first time around, I was in San Francisco, and everyone was part of it. In LA, there are a lot of people who don't care about the Internet one way or the other, so this time around, I have the benefit of constant reality checks.

Why Functional Programming Matters

One can appreciate the importance of glue by an analogy with carpentry. A chair can be made quite easily by making the parts - seat, legs, back etc. - and sticking them together in the right way. But this depends on an ability to make joints and wood glue. Lacking that ability, the only way to make a chair is to carve it in one piece out of a solid block of wood, a much harder task. This example demonstrates both the enormous power of modularisation and the importance of having the right glue.

Now let us return to functional programming. We shall argue in the remainder of this paper that functional languages provide two new, very important kinds of glue.

(After that, check out this much more populist and recent approach to the same topic.)

Seaside Screencasts Housewarming

My Seaside screencasts have a new home on Vimeo.

One of the screencasts is having a hard time making the transition; for some reason the audio keeps getting screwed up. I'm not actually sure yet whether the problem's on my machine or Vimeo's servers, but the link is good anyway, and the problem could be solved by the time you read this.

Another Beginner Smalltalk Screencast

Not by me; no Seaside content; but useful for perspective on how Squeak generally works.

(defwebapp :reddit (:index 'reddit-home) (:unsecure t))

Nifty!

Python Continuation Server

Technically not real continuations, but still very awesome.

Beautiful

Inspired rant.

Revenge Of The Nerds

There's never been a better time for the guy with no muscle definition, Coke-bottle glasses, and a laptop to influence the value of a professional athlete. In the past three years, at least a dozen baseball teams have hired the type of young statisticians you'd more commonly find working in risk arbitrage at Bear Stearns.

Mitochondria

The great thing about the Terminator movies, when it comes to actually understanding robotics and artificial intelligence, is that they deliver two extremes on a spectrum of misunderstanding. At the one end is Skynet, a computer which takes over the world, and at the other end is the Terminator, a machine which looks human.

The same thing happens in the Matrix movies, where you've got armies of giant robots hunting down humanity at the same time as you've got whole legions of human beings spending their entire lives trapped inside virtual reality.

The idea is that either computers will dominate humanity, or humanity will dominate computers. It's a classic dichotomy and it's as false as you could wish any dichotomy to be. The reality will be very different - both much more optimistic and much more creepy.

The reality is that machines will become like mitochondria. The mitochondria is a part of human cells. Originally, in the days before cells commonly existed, the mitochondria was a tiny independent organism. As cells evolved and came into being, the mitochondria was absorbed into cells and became part of the system.

This will happen - in fact, it's already happening. This robot resembles a leech, or a caterpillar, or an eel. It inches across the surface of a human heart, "injecting drugs or attaching medical devices." It makes it possible for doctors to perform surgical procedures on hearts in a less invasive surgical context than such surgeries usually happen in. It could be a marvellous improvement in safety for very important surgery. Yet it is very unnerving to witness.

I first figured out this idea in the early 90s. It was edited out of an article I wrote for Wired (which Wired edited heavily) in late 1994 and which Wired published in 1995. Being published in Wired was a thrill at the time, I was pretty young and what was going on with Wired was still very new and exciting, but the editing is the main reason I never really got into magazine writing.

But, for what it's worth, click the links. Read the article and watch the video. Something I predicted in the mid 90s is really starting to happen.

And the Hollywood dichotomy is still actually relevant. It's just that the question should be more sophisticated. The question should really be, are the machines going to be the mitochondria? Or will we?

Why Is Twitter Using A Database In The First Place?

A very good question.

Mind-Bogglingly Terrifying Car Accident

So I'm driving down the 101, downhill into Hollywood. I change lanes to the left, but there's somebody behind me and they honk. I'm already halfway into the lane when they honk so I'm like oh shit, blind spot, better change back, so I swerve back in, but I swerve too hard, and my car's gunning at an angle towards some other car, so I swerve to angle back into the lane, but you can't swerve like that headed downhill on a curvy hill, so now my car's at a right angle to all the other traffic, still moving down the hill, with its front end in the leftmost lane and its rear on the lefthand shoulder. And now I'm moving backwards with five lanes of 80mph traffic headed towards me, and the only way to keep from flying right back into all that traffic is to keep swerving, so I've got my steering wheel turned as hard as it can turn, and there's this huge fucking CRASH behind me as I hit the wall, and blue smoke everywhere from my brakes, I've had my foot on the brakes slammed to the floor for a while, and my car's not moving, but I drive a 91 Toyota Supra, and that turbo engine is still gunning forward with all its mighty ferocious heart, so I keep my foot on the brakes, but it starts lurching forwards, so I drop it in park and it's still driving forwards, grinding like a motherfucker, so I turn off the ignition and the car stops. So I'm like, oh shit, I killed my car, will it ever start again? And I'm trying to figure out whether or not I'm in the carpool lane facing against traffic, or just on the shoulder, and if I'm in the carpool lane, how will I survive, but then I see for sure I'm on the shoulder. And this lady pulls up and she's like are you OK? And all the traffic's behind her. And I tell her what happened and she's like that was me! And I'm like HOLY SHIT! and I realize my calves are twitching uncontrollably. So the lady pulls into the shoulder and calls CHP but an LAPD car sees us and tells her since nobody got hit and nobody got hurt I should take her license to be safe but she's basically free to go. So off she goes, like ok bye have a nice day, and then CHP shows up, two cars, and they stop the traffic on the highway so I can turn around, because my car's like parked perfectly on the shoulder, exactly parallel to the center divider, but pointed in the wrong direction, so they do this, they put me back on the road, and MY CAR IS ABSOLUTELY FINE! Body damage on the right but it runs perfect. So I'm like doot dee doot dee doo and fucking PERFECT no problems at all. So I hit the wall going backwards at least 70 miles per hour against the flow of LA traffic and CHP tells me I don't even need to file a report and they're like you can file it with your insurance if you want to, where are you headed? And I'm like, you see that restaurant over there? And they're like, there? That cafe? And I'm like, yeah, I wanted to get a cup of coffee, you know, little bit of energy to start the day, and they're like, well, I guess you're here, but you got your energy already, and I'm like, yeah, I guess I did, and they're like, well, have a nice day sir, and I'm like HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT WAS THE SCARIEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME AND I'VE BEEN HIT BY A CAR AND I FELL DOWN A WATERFALL ONCE AND EVERYBODY THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE BUT THIS WAS SO MUCH MORE TERRIFYING! And they're like, ok, have a nice day, so I went to the restaurant and now I'm having a latte and a pesto crepe. And this cafe is filled with all these like special FX nerds with English accents and hot blonde chicks and emo monkeys with tattoos and sexy Latinas and people writing screenplays and posturing on their cellphones and I've had the most terrifying experience of MY LIFE ever and emerged totally unscathed and they've got the Pet Shop Boys on the radio and the food is delicious and LA cops are so much smarter than New Mexico cops and so much more law-abiding than Chicago cops and the sun is shining and I nearly died but barely even broke a sweat in the process and I'm like I love LA!

By the way I obviously have an awesome car. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking! Needs a bit of body work now though.

Anyway, the moral of the story, obviously, is if an LA driver cuts you off on the freeway, don't honk at them, just let them in, otherwise they might freak out and nearly kill twenty different people, including themselves.




Update: although this post is absurdly manic, as an exercise in writing style, it is pretty successful, because I have been talking pretty much exactly like that all day. Slamming into the center divider and bouncing down the hillside backwards at absurd speeds can affect your speech patterns for hours afterwards. Also, I have to say, this is just what it feels like to have a scary but ultimately painless car accident. It's sufficiently powerful for me to realize how totally I can't imagine what actual shellshock is like (or, to use the jargon of the day, "post-traumatic stress disorder").

Looking For A Good Argument Against REST

My gut reaction is skeptical. I really don't know why. But it seems somehow wrong. Web services, APIs, Flickr, all that stuff is good -- that's it.

I know why I'm skeptical. Just because it's good in the right context doesn't mean every single thing on earth needs to support it. It's like putting mustard on ice cream just because it tasted good in a sandwich once. There's nobody out there saying "some things need REST, some things don't, and here's how you make the judgement call." There's just people saying "REST? What's that?" and people saying "REST! Hallelujah!"

It's just the typical frenzy. The religion of the hammer. Where everything looks like a nail, and everybody looks like either a believer or an infidel.

Let me correct my headline: looking for a good argument about REST. I would love to see an intelligent, rational blog post going over where REST is bad and where it's good. All praise the mighty hammer, sure, Amen, whatever, but what the grownups among us really need is a clear way to decide when to use it and when not to bother.

Obviously the whole value of REST is that it makes URLs into messages passed within an incredibly large virtual machine. Servers run on Unix but the Web itself looks more and more like Smalltalk every day that the REST frenzy grows. But the idea that every last thing in every last corner of the Web should in every single case be a URL-accessible resource is just insane. It's like, either you have resources calling URLs on each other (objects passing messages to each other), or you get infinitely fine-grained access. It's absolutely one or the other.

Screencasts Hosed My Bandwidth

If you came here for my screencasts, sorry - they kind of destroyed my bandwidth. I think my site's going to be down for the rest of the month now. Ooops.

Anyway, they're coming back soon - but not on my own site. I'll post new links when I've got them.

Make New Friends, But Keep The Old

I recently coded something very trivial in Perl. What surprised me was how long it took me.

It was a classic Perl situation; rows of text in one format that needed to turn into rows of text in another format. The classic Perl solution here is a foreach, a regex, and a sprintf() call. I've been coding Ruby so much that my first step in coding this was to try to build objects, and then an iterator.

Objects in Perl exist, in a sense, but they're nothing like Ruby objects. The brilliant book Higher-Order Perl actually shows you how to build an iterator in Perl, but that's for unusual circumstances. You don't write Perl that way. It's backwards; it disregards the relevant idioms and adds extra steps. It makes a molehill into a mountain. My solution was all wrong because I was trying to write Ruby in Perl.

It's kind of like the difference between being fluent in a foreign language and simply going native. On the one hand it's great that Ruby's style has become, to some extent, a matter of instinct for me. But I was surprised that it took me as long as it did to mentally switch gears.

When I first started doing Ruby, getting away from Java seemed almost heavenly to me. But now I almost want to code something in Java again to see how it feels different. When you learn new languages, you want to expand your skill set, not replace it.

Very Good Post

...by Jeff Atwood, here.

If you read that post, that's my main concern with Seaside, and the reason I got bored with Lisp almost before I even got started. Long story short: languages are not just languages, they are also platforms, and a great language isn't necessarily a great platform.

Another Tiny Seaside Screencast

This one's on how to kill the logo in Damien Cassou's Web dev image, and a little miscellaneous stuff about getting started.

Target audience: people getting started with Squeak. All this actually does is give you a quick overview and show you how to remove the little logo Damien's image comes preloaded with. (I'm hoping/planning to do something a little more in-depth and useful soonish, but for now that's entirely vaporware.)

If you're looking for something to get you interested in developing with Seaside, check out these screencasts - one long, one short. For an example of actually building something, check out this one (15 minutes). If you're looking for more stuff about how to get started, total basics, check this one out.

Why Geeks Should Study Acting

Chad Fowler says the best thing you can do for your career is destroy the geek culture.

He's right. And it's not just good for your career; it's good for your mental health as well.

Everybody knows that in the world of open source, community involvement is at least as important as the underlying technology. The landscape is littered with failed projects where great technology lost to great marketing. The success story of the moment is absolutely a marketing success and a social success as well as a technological success. Yet one of the worst ideas of the geek culture still persists - the idea that social skills are unnecessary, so much so that having a mild form of autism could even be considered a good thing.

The headline for the Wired article in the autism link is "The Geek Syndrome." The tagline? "Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?" My emphasis.

That's the real reason geeks need to study acting. The idea of math and tech genes. It's disgusting.

If you're a geek, you probably come from one of a small number of specific ethnicities, compared to the larger total number of ethnicities available. If you're a geek, you probably don't work with many women, and if you do, those women are mostly receptionists, management, or marketing - in other words, if you're a geek, you're unusual if you work with women at all, and very unusual if you compete with those women intellectually.

And the idea of "math and tech genes" could sound very reasonable to you.

This is why you need to study acting.

If you study acting, you'll learn the social skills you need, but you'll also get something infinitely more valuable. Despite what you may think, acting is actually intensely competitive. People think acting is like just standing around talking; in reality, it's more like boxing.

If you study acting, sometimes you'll win; sometimes you won't. You'll compete with women, and sometimes you'll lose. You'll compete with people from outside the usual narrow range of ethnicities, and again, sometimes you'll lose. And if you're honest with yourself - if you approach acting the same way you approach anything you genuinely want to do well - you'll realize that some of the times you lost, you lost because you were outsmarted; and some of the times you won, you won even though you were outsmarted.

The average run-of-the-mill geek is outsmarted by women in the workplace so infrequently that sexism is the great ugly underbelly of the tech industry. The average run-of-the-mill geek comes from a narrow range of specific ethnicities, and is outsmarted by people who fall outside that range so infrequently that the idea of "math and tech genes" seems plausible. To anybody outside the geek culture, "math and tech genes" sounds like the kind of sick bullshit you'd hear from a Nazi eugenicist, but within the geek culture, it's taken to be so obviously beyond even debating that Wired can put it in a tagline without irony or fear of backlash.

Guess what?

Math and tech genes don't exist.

Your environment shapes you, and if you're a programmer, you're in an environment where you're consistently identified as being smart, and where the people you share this distinction with all share a variety of irrelevant genetic commonalities. If all those women who are smarter than you never come into your environment, you're not going to realize they exist. If all those scary people from outside the "normal" ethnic range who can outsmart you never come into your environment either, you won't realize they exist either.

Now this sounds like an argument for peace and universal harmony; but it sounds this way because if you're reading this, you're probably a geek, and if you're a geek, you're probably ignorant and you're probably isolated, and since ignorance and isolation lead to arrogance, that means that if you're a geek, you're probably arrogant. This is not an argument for peace and love; it's an argument for self-preservation. If you're a geek, your probable ignorance and probable isolation are probably a problem for you. One time I lost a great job due to the corporate/political machinations of a black woman, and the thing is, she wasn't even being particularly subtle. She could afford to be obvious; she was operating in the shelter of a blind spot. If she had been a Chinese dude, I would have seen it coming.

So I kind of lied. This is an argument for peace and love and all that hippie stuff. But I lied to make a point. Really, like every argument for peace and love, this argument for peace and love can also be seen as an argument for self-preservation. Because an argument for peace and love is always an argument for self-preservation.

The point of destroying the geek culture isn't just that we need to change society and save the world. The point is also to destroy the geek culture within yourself, so that you're not one of the people losing their jobs because they bought into the geek culture's bullshit and neglected their social skills. Be instead a good programmer and a good marketer - because you are in marketing. Everybody's in marketing; the only difference is between people who know they're in marketing and people who haven't figured it out.







Update - the Aspberger's thing is total bullshit, by the way. Amateur office psychologists have diagnosed me with both Aspberger's and ADHD. Both diagnoses were wrong. In the Aspberger's diagnosis, I was merely concentrating; in the ADHD diagnosis, I was merely having fun. A personality is not a medical condition.

The Myth of the Blogosphere

Screenwriting bloggers don't talk about the blogosphere. They talk about the scribosphere. (It's the screenwriting sub-blogosphere.) Kathy Sierra's harassment hasn't been all over the blogosphere. It's been all over a blogosphere. Everybody in the Web tech blogosphere knows about it. Nobody in the scribosphere does. Nobody who blogs on Myspace about their dates and their clothes knows about it either.

Neither the blogosphere nor the scribosphere are spheres at all. They're networks. The metaphor is very precisely wrong. A sphere is a three-dimensional surface with all points equidistant from the center. Equidistance from the center is a very, very inappropriate feature for a metaphor for blog networks. They look more like nerve clusters.

Each specific "blogosphere" clusters around specific high-profile bloggers, and closeness or distance to these central bloggers makes for relevance or irrelevance within that particular alleged "sphere". Just as every Rails blogger knows who DHH is, every screenwriting blogger knows who Unk is. Every Myspace blogger into dance music in the state of New Mexico knows who John S. and Grant are. But to the average reader of this particular blog, all those names, except DHH, probably mean nothing.

We tend to think of the Web tech blogosphere as "the" blogosphere because Web technology people are nowhere near as deep and insightful as we like to think we are. We were here first, so our blogosphere is the blogosphere. Right? Myspace bloggers aren't real bloggers. Screenwriting bloggers aren't real bloggers. I Can Has Cheezburger? isn't a real blog.

Wrong.

There isn't one blogosphere. They are very many. And none of them are spherical.

The inappropriateness of the spherical metaphor intensifies when you consider the fractal, recursive nature of blogospheres. The Web technology blogosphere includes the Rails blogosphere, the Java blogosphere, the PHP blogosphere; large parts of the Perl blogosphere, the Python blogosphere, and the Smalltalk blogosphere; as well as markup language blogospheres and the Flash blogosphere; and large areas of the design, usability, marketing, management, entrepeneurialism, investment, and advertizing blogospheres as well.

It's pretty difficult to model this recursivity accurately with spheres. It's very easy with nerve clusters. Just picture the human brain.

Back To The Future

Battles I fought with clients are now jokes that nobody takes seriously:

A very long time ago, way back in the past… like 10 years ago, people started getting on this crazy thing called the World Wide Web. Somewhere in a dark room filled with crabby old men, it was decided that advertising online would never make sense… "nobody is really going to spend a lot of time in front of the computer. They have books & magazines to read, movies & television to watch, music to listen too…" (I guess they never thought we’d end up doing that ON the computer.)

Not only did they never think it, they made fun of me for telling them they were wrong. They made fun of me for telling them they should read Neuromancer, too.

Wait a minute. I guess this means I got the last laugh. Um. Hey.

Cool.

Seaside Screencast: Set Up Squeak

Extremely basic, how to get started stuff.

http://gilesbowkett.com/images/smalltalk_is_full_of_nifty.mov (123mb)

I have to admit, this does seem pretty trivial, but when I was first playing with Seaside, I had a number of false starts due to downloading images loaded with out-of-date versions of Seaside. I got Ramon Leon's image (which he's since updated) and that worked well, except it tried to load various Windows fonts (on my Mac) on every boot.

Of course the reason all this is possible is that Smalltalk gives you a lot of options for customization. You could even say Smalltalk is a large set of options for customization. Due to the whole "virtual machine" thing, it's almost more like using Parallels than like using Dr. Scheme. Even Eclipse doesn't come close, which is ironic given Eclipse's strong historical link to Smalltalk. (I think Eclipse even started out as a Smalltalk implementation.)

But all those options can be a bit confusing first time out. So, remember, if you're a Seaside newbie, this is the Squeak image you want to use.