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2011-11-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

Ruby Class - tl;dr

I am teaching a Ruby class focusing on beginner techniques and tools for making Rails sites. The class is in Brooklyn and meets at 1:30 on Sundays during January 2012. Five 3-hour sessions for $295 (or $245 for 3rd Ward members).

Introductory Lecture/Q&A about the class: 7:30-9, 12/13/11

My blog post about what I will teach

2011-11-29T15:22:00.000-08:00

Anticipating my Ruby class (1/8/12-2/5/12)

For the past six years, I have written Ruby code, and almost every day brings new trips to the web to learn new techniques. Ruby lets you get to the point so fast, that you are constantly immersed in integration with everything from census data to SMS servers to Facebook. You can implement world-class design patterns in a dozen lines of code - this is not a language where you write hundreds of lines of boiler-plate, day after day, just to define classes and structures. This is the future of white collar (or hipster collar) work, where you leverage dozens of systems in a way you can completely understand and customize - on your own or in any kind of group.

The flexibility of Ruby means that there are dozens of flex-points every moment. To really understand what is happening it helps to know a bit about how these are used. That is why my upcoming class will focus on teaching good habits and tricks for debugging and examining code. You will learn how to tell the difference between different kinds of errors, so you can find and fix them in a fraction of the time.

We will also learn about the Rails framework. Rails is a set of tools that help you create and deploy web sites. It comes with most everything you need, and offers plugins for almost anything else you could ask for. The rapid rate of improvement in this ecosystem has only increased as its profile has grown and grown over the past six years. Rails is opinionated software, informed by cutting-edge advances in business theory as well as security, technology, and design. The good news is that each part can be learned, and used, separately - but there is still a big vocabulary to catch up on for the newbie.

While getting familiar with the best desktop and online tools for shepherding our projects to prominence, we will also practice basic programming skills (like using objects and variables) and get more advanced if the class can handle it. As a class, we will collaborate on a couple projects so that the link between theory and real-world is as visible as I can manage.

This class is intended for beginners with no programming experience. If you've ever wondered what programming is like, please join us this January. If you are more advanced, I'll offer you more details to keep it interesting and do my best to answer your questions - but be aware that we will spend as much time as necessary going over the basics.

The class will be five 3-hour sessions, on Sunday afternoons at 1:30. We'll start on the second Sunday of the new year (1/8) and wrap it up just in time to head to a Super Bowl party (2/5). Each class will have a break in the middle, in case you were wondering. 3rd Ward is an artistic, educational, and fabrication facility in an industrial part of Brooklyn. If you haven't been there before, you are in for a real treat!

3rd Ward is also the site of a short lecture/Q&A I will host on December 13, to help you decide if the class is for you. That will be at 7:30.

To be sure, $295 is a pittance compared to most classes of this type. In addition to the 15 hours of classroom time, there will be opportunities to get help and feedback on any work you do between classes. There may also be opportunities to shadow me at work and help with some of my projects. And the whole thing will be a barrel of fun.

Seats will fill up quickly, so be aware of that. After this session there will be others, but they haven't been scheduled yet, so I'm open to hearing which days and times you might prefer.

Lastly, thanks in advance for supporting this class and making it fun and exciting for your fellow students and myself. I can't wait to see the inaugural group for this new endeavor!

2010-09-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about how I would write some test-first code in an interview, and it reminded me of using factories and mocking, and how I couldn't defend mocking to a smart young developer who had just given a talk about optimizing the performance of tests. I tried to explain why I liked it but my reasons seemed too abstract for him to buy into it. He said that letting his tests run through his whole app, it made him think everything was really working. I think he also suspected mocking would lead him to have to do more work on tests. Keep in mind that this was someone who had clearly already rewritten his tests many times in a relatively short testing career.

What if I told him it was like your app is a car, and you're testing the car. Wouldn't you want to test the individual parts, instead of waiting until the car is built? Unit testing does this, but what about when you are testing the conduit between two complex tools? Without mocking, you sacrifice your ability to inspect what is happening inside those two tools as they interact. I see the mock as a piece of specialized machinery that is designed to simulate part of your car, but is also letting you watch and measure things with as much precision as you need.

The app is also like a car in that some parts of it are there to go fast, some parts are there to keep you safe, and some parts are just there to smooth out the ride. They all need to be tested for different reasons, and sometimes it will make sense to test them in different ways. Conventions are important but if you think about it, every object has the potential for doing something unique; and you may be better able to express and use that potential if you don't hold to any presuppositions about how you are going to test something.

Cars have been made great largely because of the simplicity of decoupling the individual parts, at least to a certain extent, and seeing how each one performs in different environments. Maybe rubber tires were first used for horse buggies, and steel wheels were first used for streetcars. The tires for the Model T were sort of a hybrid; and the wheels for every car or vehicle made since then have been further hybridizations of that same tool. The point is partly that if your business is successful, your application is going to develop enough complexity to keep you coming back to the code and adding new ways to handle things. The real world is complex, and to make something truly useful you have to really marry it to the real world. Think of all the new safety regulations cars have had to meet over the years. Cars today can have 3000 or more parts. But a production application can have 3000 or more files. If you are successful, it depends on the app, but I'd bet most projects will get there if they are celebrating their tenth or twentieth birthday. Think of all the times you'll have to rewrite your tests to get through the next ten years. I think that's just how it is in a successful business, there's a lot of changes involved in achieving that appearance of stability. But that's one of the reasons that mockists like being able to describe their needs in more general, or abstract, terms, instead of only working with the side effects of a particular implementation. There is a circular logic problem, so using mocks does leave you the onus of verifying that your app pieces can actually work together. Even so, mocks can be the perfect method for combining several components in a test, and for limiting it to the ones you want. This is also a big reason why I like rr ("double r"). You can use mock.proxy to make sure your method is called the right way, and also pass the method down the chain to see what happens, right there in the same test. It's quite amazing.

So maybe this is just more abstract bs, but I think that mocking makes my app better by letting me see to it that everything makes sense, not just that it seems to work for some reason. Spending more time with the surfaces of my objects may be a hefty trade-off, but I think it will end up saving me time in the long run. Hopefully I will have a better idea after 10 more years of experience.

2010-09-03T00:47:00.000-07:00

another patience lesson

Apple has really come to prominence, and a lot has changed this decade. But, not all that much. They are still doing most things in pretty much the same way that they were in 2000. In particular, they have a relatively slow, long-term rollout of new features. They would rather release a feature quietly and let it go unused for years, while people gradually figure it out, than promise a new feature that they end up failing to deliver.

One example is the accelerometer. Apple notebooks have had it for a long time, but it is only used to protect the hard drive if the computer is dropped. It has been possible for quite some time to install software that allowed you to use the accelerometer as an input; a couple of examples would be tilting the mac to control steering for a flight simulator, or tapping the side of the screen to start your favorite applications. It may be that the laptop is a little too heavy to make those applications useful, but I still think that one day they will surface and prove useful. The iPhone has, of course, made the accelerometer much more prominent, and uses it frequently. However, the use of the accelerometer is still rather primitive; it should be possible to devise a rich vocabulary of controls that are initiated by subtle movements or tilts. But, the public need time to adapt to that reality, and Apple seems to know this better than many other companies. The foundation of their success is shipping features that are polished to a shine, but not flashy in the least.

This is a strategy that has also been clearly communicated by 37Signals, which is a small company that specializes in design but also has published several of its own web applications. Both in their stewardship of the Rails platform, and their books and blogs, they explain that simple solutions are just more effective. There are many facets and corollaries to this thesis, but the most salient one may be the annoying trend that people will give up on trying to use a web app if it is not immediately intuitive. Although there may be complicated business logic hidden in there, the interface of it should be as natural and unfettered as possible. It's relatively clear that they learned this wisdom from Apple, and the two platforms have both benefitted from recent advances in the other (for example, Apple's Objective-C 2.0 incorporated several of Ruby's most time-saving features; Ruby only became popular after 37Signals began to use and evangelize it).

Keeping my product simple, and my interface natural, is a challenge for me. There are just a whole lot of features I can add that seem powerful to me. I know that I should wait until my user base has mastered a few things at a time, and I am striving to do so. I just wanted to mention that Apple's event this week provided another reminder of their enormous patience.

When they debuted the new iPhone this summer, the most suggestive remark was that they planned to ship X millions of "FaceTime devices" this year. It was pretty clear that this videoconferencing technology would be part of the new iPod, but many wondered if it would also be incorporated into the AppleTV box. There are several big advantages to having it there - for example, your TV is usually in a spot that has a very strong WiFi signal. It has a big screen, and you don't have to hold your arm out in front of you to see it. For users, like grandparents, that might not get the point of an iPod, or might not be able to find it if they have one, the TV is a less threatening interface. And, the enclosure of the AppleTV is big enough to house a good camera, with zoom, without a miracle of engineering.

Yet we will have to be patient to see that come our way. I think Apple preferred to keep the price point down, since the first AppleTV was a bit of a failure. There may have also been awkward issues with camera placement that Apple opted to avoid, or defer for now. After all, it is "face" time, not "edge of the coffee table" time. Apple is enhancing the beauty of its product with the beauty of faces. And, although it will be years before video calling is an everyday experience, they will patiently wait for us to catch up, and just keep working on their new ideas in private.

2010-08-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

your language controls your morals

In school I was lucky enough to study two languages that are relatively uncommon subjects of study for my generation, and for Americans in general. First I studied Russian, and later I took a year of modern Greek (a year's not much but I had a Greek girlfriend who helped me understand a lot of etymological, idiomatic, and historical details that enhanced my ability to appreciate the way the language is used). I didn't master these languages, but towards the end of my study, while I was in college, I gained enough of a fascination with them to marvel at the drastic differences in grammar between them and English, and the logic in the speech patterns of foreigners that I could only apprehend after being so exposed.

For example, hearing my girlfriend speak English in a way that made sense to her Greek mind was always cute to me, and it gave me a lot of clues about how to speak Greek. In Russian, the ordering of words, and the types of words that are included or excluded, is quite different from English, so when I was in Russia trying to communicate with Russians, even if I was speaking English I would sometimes speak it in a way that was heavily influenced by Russian grammar. It's like the trick of speaking English with a Chinese accent - I think that really does make it easier for Chinese people to understand you if their English is not that strong. Think about the languages you studied and how hard it was to understand native speakers - if they spoke with an accent like yours it would be much simpler right?

Learning these other languages changed the way I spoke English. It also changed the way I saw events and agents in my life. Greece and Russia both have long histories with some very sad chapters, and I believe that I gained more patience and resilience after being exposed to their cultures. On the other hand, there are also moral codes that are mostly respected by Americans that Greeks and Russians regularly flout. There are economic, political, and historic reasons for many of them, but there are also patterns and biases in the languages themselves that lead to these consequences.

This article gives a number of examples of how your native language impacts your cognitive abilities and thinking patterns. They do devote some space to questions related to blame and culpability, which I find to be one of the great crutches of American intellectualism and politics. I worry that people assume a problem is solved once they find someone to blame (banks, BP), and they fail to step back and observe the rest of the ecosystem that contributed to the failure. I think this culture is buttressed by the legal system's treatment of admissions of guilt. Although I am not a lawyer, my understanding of tort law and, to a lesser extent, criminal law, is that if you admit that you were at fault, the court doesn't make much of an effort to examine (or deny) your culpability; rather it relishes the opportunity to "call it a day" and just let you take the fall. This atomic view of agency (i.e. each crime is the "fault" of exactly one person) not only leads to elaborate and irrelevant machinations in the courtroom, and pathetic framings and cover-ups, but it also makes people behave in a truly shameful way just so they can avoid being under the gun at the wrong moment. Seeing a disaster about to happen, Americans are less likely to lend a hand, lest they be standing closest to the pit when things collapse. (Conversely, if everyone stepped in and grabbed on, the thing wouldn't collapse at all).

I think the oil spill in the Gulf is a great illustration of how we miss the point. When the explosion first happened, the survivors were isolated for days until they signed papers exonerating BP - their families had no way to know if they were alive or arrange care for their injuries. This is barbaric but it makes perfect sense in light of the American laws under which the company was operating. On that topic, part of the reason the rig was so unsafe in the first place is because it was registered as a vessel under a foreign flag that you've never heard of - a nation whose safety standards for oil rigs are essentially non-existant. Now, the issue of America regarding the sovereignty of other nations is complex, but to an extent I think it's accurate for me to portray the situation as follows: by mandating a full safety inspection for American vessels, but allowing unsafe vessels under other flags to operate in the Gulf, our government is encouraging businesses to skimp on safety-related investments, and simply shrugging and passing the buck when the other shoe falls. This time, the penalty for this short-sighted approach will cost us dearly in many ways. Is this the idiot tax we pay for speaking English?

BP's spokesperson, Tony Hayward, has been roundly criticized for not being more apologetic. Yet, in both cultural and legal terms, this was exactly the right course for him to take. Legally, his non-admission will make it much harder for courts to rule that BP was negligent and not merely unlucky. Culturally, the withholding of a memorable moment of denouement will make it harder for Americans to remember BP in a negative light.

I want to take a quick digression here to clarify that I understand why courts and laypeople refer to admissions as reliable indicators of guilt - in the aftermath of a tragedy, no one typically can ever reconstruct events with the same clarity that is available to the perpetrators. If Tony really thinks this was just a fluke accident, that is relevant information with regard to our attitude and policy on other underwater oil wells (which are mostly managed by BP, incidentally). If he, deep down, knows that they were taking too many chances with their safety policies, then that's an indication that we will potentially be able to prevent more disasters by running a tighter ship.

So yes, an individual's assessment of his own guilt is often the most reliable information on what can be done to prevent future tragedies, and it rightly has a prominent place in an investigation. Yet we must make more room for revision and elaboration - especially when you consider how faulty our memories have been shown to be, and how irrational our motives actually are (refer to Arielly and Vedantam for more exposition of this topic). We do want to know whether BP knew the practices were unsafe - but we don't need to know that so we can punish them. We need to know it so that we can figure out how to keep the other wells managed by other companies safe. I am really worried that Americans and our politicians are just going to focus on BP and allow this and other disasters to happen over and over. The masterful job that BP has done at deflecting the blame (replacing Hayward with an American, keeping journalists away from the Gulf without raising a stir for doing so) will prolong the obsession with nailing them to a cross, and postpone the process of doing the cleanup and reform that actually matters. And since BP only sells oil to other oil companies, not to consumers, there is nothing to boycott and really no action we can take. It is a British company. (Don't be fooled by the BP branding on gas stations, it's a vestige).

As you may be able to see, the entire company is set up in a way that is ideal for deflecting culpability, and the laws governing their operation have just the same orientation. Sadly, many American businesses are set up this way, and this leads to massively wasteful business practices. Most of us can understand that in the long run, it is more profitable to respect the environment, both natural and social, even though doing so incurs many expenses in the short term. Yet American businesses are mostly focused on the short term, and this is, in a nutshell, why our economy has failed to take care of us and our happiness despite the tremendous natural and intellectual resources we have at our disposal.

So what does this have to do with the language we speak? English sentences put a lot of emphasis on the actor, the agent, the responsible party. We are in the habit of specifying who does things, and this tendency helps us forget that they are acting within a set of circumstances that were created by thousands of other agents. It tricks us into thinking that people plan and intend to do whatever they end up doing. And it leads us to thoughts of punishment rather than prevention. English is great for things like scientific investigation and storytelling. But, for maintaining a civil society, we would have a lot to gain from the viewpoints cultivated by languages spoken in places with a longer history of keeping themselves safe by keeping their neighbors content. Remember, although English is not as young as America itself, the British Isles are physically isolated from all of their contemporaries, which is a situation that could have cultivated something of a blissful arrogance, an attitude unworkable in a truly huge society.

All these are some of the reasons why I think learning language skills should not be an undertaking of learning words, so much as one of learning sentences (or lines, if you will). Words can mean any number of things depending on how they are used - so seeing how they actually have been used gives you way more information about what they really mean.

2010-04-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

lost iPhone: might not be a coincidence

An Apple employee lost an iPhone at a bar. Now, maybe it was done on purpose, but that's kind of unclear. If we assume it wasn't, I think it's quite possibly an indication that this phone is easier to lose than the current iPhone. My reason for thinking so is because of repeated observations about the way people use their iPhones and the way they use their BlackBerries.

Basically, BlackBerries aren't as thin (front-to-back) and the corners aren't as smooth, so it's harder to shove them into your pocket . Also, the buttons and scroll wheel can get caught on creases or seams in the fabric of your pants, such as the fifth pocket that most jeans have inside the front right pocket. As a result, people are way more likely to just set the BlackBerry on the bar instead of putting it in their pocket. Then they get drunk and leave it there.

This is also related to the fact that BlackBerries cultivate more addictive behavior by virtue of the push email. Sure, the iPhone has had push email capability for a year or two but I don't think most people use it. Conversely, most BlackBerry owners don't know how to turn it off (if it is even possible; I don't actually know). The consistent interruptions create behavior patterns where people are addicted, and check for new messages every few minutes (that is why they are so frequently called CrackBerries by people who have had them for a while). Combine this with the chore of shifting your weight so you can dig it out of your pocket and you have a device that people can't help losing, all the time.

The new iPhone looks like it might be significantly boxier, and somewhat harder to shove into your jeans while seated at a bar stool. Also the buttons look like they might have a bigger profile (so they can get caught on the fabric). The result may be a phone that people are bound to lose.

This could be a really big problem. iPhone owners are often social people (one of the strengths of the iPhone is the simplicity with which you can manage contact lists that stretch into the thousands). They are also typically people who have a few extra bucks to spend at the bar. If this is indeed a characteristic of this new phone, it will rear it's head many many times.

Losing phones has become extremely common, and I have always felt that the iPhone is a great phone to lose because if you are even remotely responsible about connecting it to your computer, and have told it to sync with your address book, you don't miss a beat. You plug in your new phone and it has everything including the history of your text conversations. If you use MobileMe and have push notifications enabled, you can also erase the data on the iPhone you lost. There is no need to respond to every text with "Who is this? I lost my numbers" and no need to make a BS facebook group begging your friends to take the time to have pity and send over their numbers.

I don't blame Apple for giving people reasons to get new iPhones. However, traditionally, they have been positive reasons that people could feel good about. Losing a phone that costs $500 to replace is a relatively negative experience for many of the young people who adore their iPhones. I understand that a bigger enclosure facilitates better computing, but at what cost? I trust Apple to find the right trade-off here but I just wanted to add this note of warning because the thin profile is one of the things I love most about my phone. What can I say, I wear tight pants sometimes! And I like shoving it in my pocket while web pages are loading so I'm hands free and ready for action, not standing around like a tool.

There is probably a better design coming for the next iPhone, but what do I know about that? I just hope it works for my needs.

2009-11-06T12:16:00.000-08:00

In my dating life I have been trying to pay attention to what I can do to find and meet women who are really attractive to me. One piece of advice that I came across was that keeping notes on the conversations you have is a really good way to diagnose your weaknesses, especially when you share your notes with a coach. My project lineoftheday is designed for exactly this process, and I have really high hopes for it's potential to help people improve their conversation skills.

Even if you're not delivering handwritten notes, one principal reason having a coach is helpful is because you have someone you have to tell if you don't practice your skills. Being accountable to someone you trust is a powerful motivator for almost anyone. In my youth I felt guilty telling my piano teacher that I hadn't practiced. She encouraged me to diligently write down my minutes every day, not do it from memory later in the week. She was showing me how to manage my guilt, by allowing my accountability to release the pressure on me to make decisions.

Being accountable at work is an area I've had to explore because I've worked in a few situations where my managers weren't especially proficient at evaluating what I was doing, and I wasn't always interested in taking the time to translate it into their terms. I have tried out a couple different approaches for bridging the gap, and I'm definitely starting to think that there are some good ones out there.

Github provides a simple way to view the chronology of my work, although the timestamps aren't very precise in the commit history view. Pivotal Tracker also keeps timestamps for when you start, update and finish stories. And you can use pickler to synchronize your tracker stories with the passage of your cucumber tests. Using a similar tool to synchronize tracker stories with rspec examples would be great, but I'm thinking about taking it one step further, and using the spec log to analyze every time the spec is run, not just the first time it passes.

Apart from making you accountable, the other primary reason that having a coach accelerates your progress is that he has been there before and he knows what you can do to address your mistakes. He's probably seen it a few times before in other guys as well, and seen what eventually enabled them to get around it.

If you shared every attempt you made to get the spec to pass, a coach would be able to point out which approaches were more reliable for the future, or explain what was missing in your earlier attempts. And simply by being exposed to the problems you're trying to solve he would be able to recommend alternative approaches you may not have known about. It would be like watching instant replay of you writing the code.

Git definitely provides the technology for making instant replay possible. Integrating it with spec runners that run specs on every save, or those that run individual specs or groups, would be the pivotal step in making coders accountable to their coaches. Now that github is so fast, it might be the preferred method of reviewing the code, but others could definitely be devised that focused on the individual histories of specs.

Accountability to your business associates could also be generated by the timestamps and metrics of your journey. In a normal workday you might only commit code five or ten times, and there's no evidence that you weren't on youtube for an hour in between. But you probably save a file every thirty seconds. And maybe you always get your specs passing within three tries. After running the repo and spec data through algorithms that make graphs of it, these strengths could be visible to your managers at a level of detail that would make you very much accountable for the quality and consistency of your effort. To measure the effectiveness of it, instant replay mode for Pivotal Tracker could be implemented, perhaps via the api.

I learned recently that watching yourself on video is such an effective means of correcting mistakes that sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to unlearn them. Simply having seen it once is enough.

Viewing your own replays could give the same results. Being accountable to yourself and others helps you work smarter because there are manufactured consequences for writing lazy code. And being able to see new patterns can help steer you in a direction of not even having to write much code. But it's something you have to see many times before you can write it sometimes. Your brain is always busy learning patterns that it doesn't tell you about.

When a famous coder publishes changes to a library he knows that they're going to be read over by lots of people, so his accountability is in place. When a famous pickup artist talks to girls in front of a camera, or just a microphone, he knows people are going to listen. And in both cases, part of how he got so good was by establishing that accountability so that he had to be good. You can establish it faster if you use artificial tools to manufacture it, simply by layering abstractions on top of it. I know this approach seems frivolous to some purists but to me it's just observing and regarding the natural phenomena that motivate people to act.

2008-11-20T10:17:00.005-08:00

I like coding without parentheses, partly to verify that my code respects the law of Demeter and other principles. Is it bad that I want a regexp that will highlight the arguments being passed to a method so I can be sure about when I need parens?

2008-11-20T10:17:00.003-08:00

Shouldn't we rewrite RubyForge with ajax?

2008-11-20T10:17:00.001-08:00

Should we lobby for Obama on Rails?

2008-11-20T10:16:00.003-08:00

a rails version of phpmyadmin?

2008-11-20T10:16:00.001-08:00

Is there anything left on your wishlist of what Engine Yard provides?

2008-11-20T10:15:00.004-08:00

Is it a problem that some libraries now want us to use unnecessary parentheses?

2008-11-20T10:15:00.003-08:00

How can we help postgres gain ground?

2008-11-20T10:15:00.001-08:00

If there was an option that caused stack traces to print out the arguments that were passed to each method, would that demolish performance?

2008-11-20T10:14:00.002-08:00

Aren't stored procedures a good scaling tool? Are they easier to maintain if they are written in Ruby (for postgres)?

2008-11-20T10:14:00.001-08:00

Is there any way to have proprietary Ruby code besides serving it through a web app?

2008-11-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Is publishing (& blogging), releasing code, and other self-promotion the biggest factor that made you better at Ruby?

2008-11-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

What I want to know about Ruby

As the finale of the Voices that Matter: Professional Ruby conference, Obie solicited questions from the audience and I managed to come up with several. That transfer of knowledge was great, but it was centralized kind of like a subversion repo. To raise it to the power of git, I would like to see what you all think about these dreams I have.

please answer the questions by leaving comments on the individual posts

Is publishing, blogging, releasing code, and other self-promotion the biggest factor that made you better at Ruby?

Is there any way to have proprietary Ruby code besides serving it through a web app?

Aren't stored procedures a good scaling tool? Are they easier to maintain if they are written in Ruby (for postgres)?

I like coding without parentheses, partly to verify that my code respects the law of Demeter and other principles. Is it bad that I want a regexp that will highlight the arguments being passed to a method so I can be sure about when I need parens?

Should we lobby for Obama on Rails?

If there was an option that caused stack traces to print out the arguments that were passed to each method, would that demolish performance?

a rails version of phpmyadmin?

Is there anything left on your wishlist of what Engine Yard provides?

Is it a problem that some libraries now want us to use unnecessary parentheses?

How can we help postgres gain ground?

Shouldn't we rewrite RubyForge with ajax?

2008-09-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Once I heard someone mention that although not everybody likes good music, almost everyone likes some kind of music. That made me think of why people like music, and how they learn the things they need in order to know whether they like it.

My conclusion is that people like recognizing patterns and recognizing when patterns have been broken. I think it's pretty straightforward to see the way these two things impact musical composition. A pattern is formed by repetition, but also by the sound of the instruments and the placement of the beats, and a hundred other things. Breaking the pattern allows you to deliver a surprise or a standout note, but also creates a new pattern that can be referenced later.

Focusing on patterns gives a perspective on why effect pedals are so fun. It's not just that the sound is cool; there's also a repeating pattern in terms of what the pedal does to the sound wave that can be recognized by the brain. When I play, I like to make those pretty subtle, so they can be noticed, but it's hard enough to hear that you actually feel kind of proud of yourself when you do. This also makes it more practical to layer more effects simultaneously.

My pedal collection grew this year, but even when I had six I was lacking some of the most typical effects that you usually see with guitar. Purchasing a couple of those (overdrive and wah-wah) has really enhanced my sound because they can be used with all of my other stuff and, in most cases, make it much prettier. When spending around a hundred bucks on a pedal, there is definitely a temptation to get fancy ones that do major surgery to the sound wave, but I think the next ones I go for will be more fundamentals, like chorus, distortion, tremolo, volume, and even phaser (which I have long considered a bit lame). My local guitar shop has vintage pedals and offers many options for most of these, and I admit I will probably opt for the funkier varieties of each rather than the plainest that can be found. I guess I'll give it some thought.

2008-05-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

daily drawings

when I started my job at mophie, one of the first suggestions I made to my boss was to implement 'daily drawings', which meant that everyone had to draw at least one picture each day. I didn't think it would consume too much time, and I thought it would help our work in a number of ways. The work we were doing was extremely creative, in the sense that we were building a lot of almost-tangible things out of thin air. We were producing not only artwork and code but the laws of a community and a new economy. Because of the relatively high pressure and seemingly huge consequences of getting it right, I thought it would be great to spend time each day doing work that was essentially zero-pressure. Working on our doodling and looking at our coworkers' could also stimulate some new ideas for visual designs or data structures.

Our work was heavily reliant on prototyping, then progressively adjusting and enhancing. Having the courage to create something at your top speed and show it to people immediately was something I knew would be important for me to work on. Reflection had its place in our work as well, but I think it would have been easier to reflect on our designs if we had more alternatives in mind to compare them with. Best of five is sometimes a different thing than best of two. There were a few things I did to try to get myself working at top speed, but I wasn't really able to do so most of the time. Often I felt that I wasn't getting the type of help from my coworkers that I needed. For example, when I suggested daily drawings, my boss agreed to let me do it. But he never told anyone else to try it, and he never reminded me about it. He did get me a coloring book, but there's a big difference between coloring and drawing. Several of the other employees were drawing things almost every day as part of their work, but I thought it wouldn't be too much to ask to have each one draw something on paper and hand it in every day. One day my boss did indulge my request to go to the art store and get markers, pens, colored pencils, crayons, and some reasonably nice ones at that. They made their way into use at the design table, and I used them to mark up some books so the other guys could find the important stuff (a lot of computer books have just one important line per page). I did drawings from time to time but never close to every day.

A lot of the drawings I do are just abstract scribbling, so it's not difficult or involved stuff. I should start daily drawings. Feel free to join me.

2008-04-28T23:07:00.000-07:00

I am stupefied by how dead Brooklyn and Manhattan seem at night. I realize that thousands are sleeping within earshot of just about anywhere you go, but I would expect to see more life regardless, and I would love it if the daytime and evening culture were still available in small doses during the wee hours. Why shouldn't I be able to go buy a book and a muffin at 2:30 am? If we could provide that stuff for those who want it without causing nuisance to those who don't, I bet these two boroughs would spawn a nifty handful of all-night cafes.

Dampening noises is a tricky endeavor wherein a lot of things work well but few things work really well. I suspect that the invention of some kind of active panels might be the breakthrough we need. There are a lot of social norms that would change if we didn't have to worry about waking people up as much. There are also a lot of ways the economy would change if we could treat the night more like the day or evening.

Another invention I expect to deeply impact New York City late next decade is some product that absorbs sweat and keeps it off your clothes, no matter what you're wearing or how much you're sweating. I don't know if it will be an ultra-absorbent fabric or a battery-powered vaporizer or a bacteria that turns the sweat into oxygen, or a hybrid of all three. But I see a huge gain to be had in enabling more people to make practical use of their skills in running and cycling, and for more of the year, and in freeing people to exert themselves without needing to arrange logistics for a shower.

2008-03-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

does anyone deserve anything?

it definitely makes sense to give people things, to think of them as tied to actions, even to feel entitled, for plenty of practical reasons. but nothing is tied to anything, it's merely a figure of speech meant to inspire trust. but even if you do trust someone and believe that they should trust you, that doesn't change the liklihood that you will sometimes disagree about what is best for them. and while you can get a lot of mileage by securing the trust of others, there must be some cases where your interest trumps theirs. who deserves anything then? at these points people make up excuses about somebody else being more deserving of some other reward that may not even be logically related to the situation.

we all act principally out of self-interest, it seems, at this point in our evolution. it can be very hard for a person to accurately judge the differences in personal satisfaction and stimulation that are liable to result from their actions and inactions. but they will sometimes be capable of influencing themselves by listening to predictions of how other people will behave in the form of arguments. most political argument is about behavior, but argument is behavior, I think that's what makes it so inherently dubious and we all prefer to listen to ourselves. Is that what Rawls said?

well despite how hard it can be to listen to someone without internally interrupting, correcting, or reinterpreting some of what they say, we are sometimes able to do it and genuinely change our own minds about how to become happier through sincere changes in our behavior. they are still motivated by selfishness. but they often carry great benefits to huge numbers of people, some of whom are able to pay it forward or pay it back. perhaps one reason the film 'pay it forward' seemed as plausible as it did was because people are familiar with the desire to stay in someone's good favor after they have just given you a gift and insisted that you not immediately reciprocate. often that feeling is expressed by the desire to give something to someone else, something they'll truly appreciate. why do people feel guilty upon receipt of such a gift? why do they feel bad when we really meant for them to feel good? it is because of the misunderstanding of this word 'deserve'.

2008-03-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Surveillance tools are becoming stronger and harder to compromise. We have a lot of reasons to expect that they will play an increasing role in law enforcement.

For that reason, we have an imperative to repair our code of laws in a somewhat timely way so that we don't suddenly imprison all of our society's most valuable rebellious minds. Not all of our laws are ideal - that should be clear. The ones that mess with our melting pot in the wrong ways will do us a lot of damage if we don't get humble about reforming them before the police state is realized.

2008-03-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

will iphone please let me

use a bluetooth keyboard?

play music through airport express?

choose when I get reminders about events?

2008-03-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

the law is more complex because its biased.

2008-01-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

getting better tunes

I have been aware for a long time that there was a lot of great music being produced that I simply wasn't hearing. Some of the best music that I have heard, I have few ways to find. I like asking friends for tips but I also wanted a way to get things my friends didn't know about. The internet isn't always a good place for that because you have to type an address or a search query before you get anything; you can't just get something for nothing, or without having a lead to it already.

Lately some sites have been doing a much better job at making that possible. Last.fm is a great way to find music and share what you've found. And Garageband.com has created something for facebook and itunes called iLike that lets you download tracks by less-known bands that resemble the stuff you listen to. After you figure out which ones are good, and begin listening to them, last.fm will compare them to your other bands and start recommending them to other people who have your taste. Then in the coming months, your recommendations will reflect their selections, giving you the benefit of their exposure to new music that you haven't reached.

Decentralized brains like this can become tremendously powerful without much effort on any one person's part, and most people already go to the effort of playing music on their computer, choosing some tracks and skipping others. Install last.fm's software and it will invisibly track your playlist and upload it to your profile, essentially sharing your wisdom with everyone else who's looking for good music. The cool thing is that neural networks like this can make judgments about songs without any clear rationale or any single criterion. This allows them to draw the line between good and great more accurately than most other means of evaluation.

Once I identify an artist I'm interested in, I download everything of theirs I can find to discover the few gems. For years I have used Acquisition to do this, and been impressed by the several special features it uses to trim busywork out of the process. I purchased a family license back when I was in college, and shared it with several people (the few who had macs, back before everyone did). When I recently upgraded to version 2, my license was unexpectedly voided, and I was pretty annoyed that I had not been warned. But after using the unlicensed software for a few weeks now, I am planning to pay for another license because this program is an important part of my quest to become a dj and help make my friends better djs. I'll explain why I like it soon.

2007-06-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

There's not much, if any, hard proof of the existence of a God, at least not enough that most people aren't convinced specifically by it. Theories about God's intentions towards our world are formulated in a way that claims our faith will be more useful if tested by the lack of evidence, and encourage lip service by promising superb penalties. Yet none of us can really be sure, and if indeed God designed us then he knows this about us. Since we have no communication from Him, we have little reason to think that He cares so much whether we are certain in our belief. And again, He should and would know that none of us would ever be completely certain.

Yet the houses of worship that focus on these things have the unfortunate policy of insisting that their attendees claim to be certain of His existence. Since no one is certain, this amounts to insisting that we all lie. And that creates an atmosphere wherein people are never sure when they can be honest and when they cannot.

Lies beget more lies, and in this atmosphere, it becomes difficult to distinguish truths from lies told centuries ago, or even from lies told weeks ago. So many lies and misinterpretations sneak their way in among many wise aphorisms that serve to justify the lot. Many of these writings are useful sometimes, so followers may lose sight of the fact that they are utterly untrue in other scenarios, and try to cultivate a habit of blind obedience. This is not a tactic that fits comfortably into the human psyche, and anyone who employs it, or has it wished upon them, will undergo a lot of torment by it.

Now that we can see, not only how our living world functions, but also how our brains and remarkable bodies do, we no longer need religious answers to our unanswered questions. We can see that there exist morals in terms of the probability of good or bad consequences for different sorts of behavior, so we don't need religion for moral guidance. Yet we can make good use of the centuries of moral and psychological tradition that our houses of worship have evolved. But we must end our insistence upon lying that we are certain that God exists.

I know that some religious leaders claim that failure to express certainty will be punished in hell, and even that failure to attempt to convert the uncertain will also be. But because of the way human brains and bodies work, these claims are the cause of endless misery, and even deaths. Surely it can be conceded that it's at least as likely that God would want us to be happy, mentally healthy, and living, and could forego the conceit of endless adoration so that the billions of minds we have could create something truly amazing, which would glorify Him. As we are we can barely hold our societies together.

And if it really is possible to live a moral life, do good unto others, turn the other cheek, give to charity, and still go to hell for faithlessness, then that's civil disobedience, which, as you know, is totally worth doing and makes you feel better than just about anything else. If God is so self-obsessed that He'll punish good people with the utmost severity just because they didn't bow down to Him, then I'm not sure if I'd feel comfortable worshipping Him. And I'm not the only one who's speculated that hell might just be more tolerable than you'd think, or even better than heaven.

This weekend I attended a panel of atheist authors at the Book Expo, which when addressed with a question about agnosticism, offered arguments intended to prove that God can't exist. One said that if God was good, it was impossible that He would let us go through this disgraceful ruckus and not simply reveal Himself. Another said that Ocham's Razor indicated that there was no Creator. But I found both of these utterly unconvincing, and I'm not even invested in thinking that He does exist, I'm merely aware of the flip sides of both of these logical tricks. Because, as I said, I believe that no one, not even these vocal atheists, feels completely certain whether God exists or not, I find denying it just as dubious, if not quite as destructive, as affirming it.

Yet because most of what our religion tells us to do would be good policy anyway, we can do that part of it without bringing God into it more than He already is. As for the sexism, hetero-normativism, human exceptionalism, and other anti-social trappings, we'll just have to do without them and trust in God to know that we're doing the right things.

2007-06-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

The time is ripe to begin repair on our transportation system. Since the middle class has so many new and increased financial burdens, including a war, a prohibition-induced black market, a corporate class that lives off billions in welfare, and crisis-level emergency-room bills that result from business acting like there's no tomorrow and more profit today is always better. There are a lot of families that could afford a car three years ago, but within three years will not be able to. With the cost of owning and fueling one rising steadily, the sooner we can cut out those expenses the better.

Paris is rolling out twenty thousand rental bikes - nice ones that they're paying over a grand for. Unlike the many rental bike programs that you might be familiar with, these do not charge a flat rate up front, and they are also not totally free. They are free for the first half hour, 1.30 for the next, 2.6 for the next, and up from there. This system is very popular and very clever because many of the trips people take are under 30 minutes, and for longer ones they may be willing to pay because a taxi would cost at least ten times more (unless the route permitted unusually fast driving).

Now, you might think this is an unproven model, but it has already worked in Lyon. Thirty minutes is a long grace period - people love being treated like that. It's one thing we're maybe not as good at here in the states. But we need to save some money right now. And we can even make a system that's far better than this one Paris is debuting.

First, we offer several types of bikes. At this point there are a few pretty distinct styles. A lot of the people who are serious about going fast and pedaling strong actually use fixed-gear bikes that don't shift, don't coast, and sometimes don't even have brakes. Others prefer traditional road bikes with ten speeds or so. Older riders tend to prefer cruisers whose handlebars reach back so they can sit up straighter. Some kids from my generation like their bikes to be tough enough for moderately off-road terrain. And in a lot of neighborhoods it's more fashionable to ride small bmx wheels.

Preferences vary by rider and by trip - and the more possibilities are covered, the more popular the system will be, and the more impact it will have on our collective budget and fuel economy. The more bikes we can get on the street, the better the flow of traffic will be. The rules of the road will evolve, and I could be wrong about the eventual outcome, but I suspect that enough cars will be off the road that travelling by car will be faster than it is today, and travelling by bike will be faster than travelling by car for a supermajority of intra-city trips.

And since bike traffic is so lightweight and maneuverable, it will be easier to cross streets and pull moves like running in the road if you want to get somewhere fast or just get some exercise en route. Of course, all but the most hardcore can probably settle for the exercise of riding one of the free bikes, but if it were safe to run in the street I bet you'd see people doing it. And they might not even be the most hardcore.

Sidewalks and subways would be less crowded because lots of folks would opt to ride instead. On the other hand, both would pick up some traffic from the population would would have been in cars in the old transit network. It's likewise probable that car and taxi traffic would go down, but as the annoyances related to congestion go down, more drivers usually show up to fill the gaps. If riding among hundreds or thousands of bikes turns out to be annoying, even more may opt out of cars, which would be great news for our safety, health, community awareness, and even our social skills - you can look people in the eye when you're on a bike.

In Paris bikes have to be returned to locking stations, but we could use better wireless technologies to just stop the clock when the bike is parked anywhere, and detect theft in other ways. We could allow or even commission people to paint the bikes so they wouldn't all look the same, would have some flair and some individuality. They could be identifiable as rentals in other ways, like LEDs or a computer mounted to the frame. It would perform functions like wirelessly identifying the rider, recording data about the route, speed, and time of trips, and keeping track of whether any repairs or tuning was needed. It would use a cell radio to transmit and an RFID reader to identify - and if it didn't pick up your RFID signal after the first few blocks it could apply the brakes until you called some authority, to identify yourself, and told them where you were, to identify the bike (or just identified its number or paint job). The transmitter could be embedded in the frame so it couldn't be disabled without destroying the bike; and if one rider was using the same one over and over then anti-theft investigations could take place.

Yet it's quite possible that it would be less expensive to not even have an anti-theft staff. If the need is met well enough, riders would have no reason to steal the bikes. Once enough data about use is collected, most needs will be predictable and able to be met (trucks and subways could carry bikes to where they were needed or people could be paid a modest sum to ride them there). And pricing models that charge prohibitively large fees to riders that use the same bike over and over without interruption would discourage theft because once the thing identified you and the cell radiod it in, you'd be better off leaving it for someone else rather than taking it inside. Even if theft is a relatively serious problem despite all this, it might be more cost-effective to simply replace the bikes, because the demand will decrease with every theft, and the more bikes in use, the greater the societal savings and gains.

Yet compared with the hassle of always locking up a bike, bringing it up the stairs or elevator to your apartment, and taking it through the turnstyle and on the subway, it would be a lot more convenient to just leave it and find another later. And if we get nice enough wheels, this is exactly what many current riders will do. Because although the subways and buses may try their best, it's not that convenient to take a bike there and this is why most of us don't ride. A smart bike program would therefore not only get bikes out of the subway, but also get more of us on the trains and buses and out of taxis. The only problem would be a taxi shortage when it rains. Of course, all the bikes would have fenders to stop spray.

Why is this feasible? Why do I imagine that Americans can overcome fifty years of car-reliance and just welcome this new system, sweatiness and all? Because cycling is faster than driving, it's counterintuitive but true, and our cities and our cars may be shaped differently here than they are in France but it's still true here. People will be drawn by the saved time, convinced by the saved money, and addicted by the thrill.

We can also have a funky website that allows people to make their rides public, so you can see who else has used the bikes you've ridden. Pointless, maybe, but I think people will enjoy it and it will even help them connect to each other and break the ice. You can see who added which decorations to the paint job, see which routes others use and how long the take, and relive some of the thrilling moments of recent history or your own life years ago. Or study the paths of individual bikes to learn about urban patterns and probabilities (and see which routes are fastest at which times of day). I also think that having this site would make people more eager to ride the bikes - just to see who each one would link them to.

This plan is especially feasible because the populations in our cities have relatively weak and worn-out bike fleets. A fair number of people have crap bikes, but the number that has nice ones is, at my guess, under one percent. So the rentals will be filling a need that is very largely unmet, and for those who really want to own their bike, the price will come way down. The feasibility of going without a car will go way up, and the viability of delivery services will go up so their cost will come down, as will the cost of gas. And this will help the motorcycle market grow, granting affordable intercity mobility.

2007-05-24T00:18:00.001-07:00

There is no hard distinction between us and animals. I know a lot of people think it's ok to deny that evolution happened. But you're not just ignoring a humongous accumulation of scientific evidence. The evidence is right in front of your eyes almost everywhere you look. It's really not feasible to pretend there's some scientific conspiracy - because after being exposed to the theory, you can validate it a hundred times without doing a single experiment.

I think the main motivation for pretending that humans are different from animals is to preserve the concept of evil. I believe that the thing people have in mind when they speak of evil is a phantom that does not exist. But I understand why it seems so useful to generalize in this way. Everything has consequences, and some of them annoy or upset us. That's true enough, but it's not an excuse to lie. And simplifying to the point of claiming that a certain deed's consequences make it 'evil' is lying to yourself.

This reflects a habit that I think we picked up from reporters. They want to dramatize events by imagining that consequences are caused by one thing. That one person is to blame when something goes wrong, and it's their job to just figure out who. This is preposterous. The responsibility and blame for any given event would be more accurately assigned to a large number of individual actors, in almost any case. Yes, it might not have happened without person X, but that's no reason to ignore the rest of the information that can be seen as relevant to the fact. If investigators truly cared about learning something they can apply in the future, my advice is to not use arbitrary constraints and assumptions about who's culpable, and who should have known better.

Another reason this mythology persists is because certain bitter white folks just have an insatiable desire to punish people and dream that it will help something. They are just addicted to torturing people and getting away with it. They always try to make it seem like punishment is the most important shit that can happen. My version of what's up? Punishment does nothing important - it only teaches more people how to do more horrible things. The only thing to do about crime and misbehavior is to prevent it, and once you're at the punishment stage it's already been not prevented. There's no more opportunity to prevent it, contrary to the desperate wishes of white fools (and some hispanic ones as well).

We have the opportunity to prevent future antisocial moves, yes. And this is why an otherwise clever guy might think that incarceration makes some sense. But we have hundreds of strategies we could employ to prevent antisocial behavior, and we don't have the compunction to use almost any of them. Prison is perhaps the most anti-social construction we could have envisioned, bringing together many of those desperate enough to devalue their reluctance to hurt people. Brains learn by seeing, repeating, and doing. And I think its pretty clear that the consequences of incarceration are overwhelmingly and pitifully negative.

Apologists will see a way out in scoffing at my suggestion that turning the other cheek is a smarter way to prevent future offenses. But a lot of the people who really know what's up in terms of taking responsibility for actions have known this for thousands of years. We're just less responsible than them, but I'm telling us, our alternative sucks.

Another reason a lot of fools 'put up with' prison is because they 'like their markets to be free'. But our markets are not free, and this is another case where pretending can get us into trouble. You need to spend money to make money, and in a society populated in the millions, no individuals will step forward to spend, to make those needed investments. Look at how we've failed to invest in our people, our urban spaces, our futures, our education. Econ majors tricked many of into thinking that we can get by without investing in ourselves, we can 'make money'. But we haven't made anything, we've just sold everything we had that was worth something. Our potential. Our happiness. Our society.

So please come to grips with the disappointing and counterintuitive fact that our prison system causes way more problems than it solves. If you have trouble, focus on the word 'antisocial'. You've learned from your experience that treating people like garbage doesn't have good results. Treat people well and much happier days come to pass.

Despite whatever statistics say about reductions in crime, or any purported success of incarceratory policies, they have created an intensely antisocial society that I regret growing up in. Sure, we're relatively safe from property crime and violence. But we are hostage to racist stereotypes that define the range of acceptable behavior and fill us with pointless fear. We are not able to use our minds because we are constantly distracted by shitty concepts of what's legal, written by cowards who vainly decided to try for an easy way out. Well guess what, it's time to admit failure or get ready for totalitarian, third world status. Not third by standards of wealth or how happy people SAY they are. But in terms of real joy, real opportunity, the US has very little to look forward to right now because we've recently cashed out all our investments. Except our investments in terror and urban chaos.

2007-04-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

I do love saving some surprises when I can. I avert my eyes from movie commercials and have stopped watching trailers online. I am careful about when to say what, in order to set up some savory moments for my friends, in a way that people don't seem to do much anymore. And when dealing with things that have secrecy is an integral part of their identity, like crushes or Yale's societies, I'm barely even tempted to talk. For some reason that I don't fully understand, I don't yet feel any such obligation of secrecy to Apple. Perhaps it's because I'm not fully on board with their marketing (which arguably portrays the mac as some sort of black box (or should I say white box, or blacboox) that the user doesn't need to know anything about. I feel that everyone would benefit from a campaign that showed us more of how to use it, or that alluded more to the ease and power of the mac flavor of the nerdier stuff). I have to admit that Apple is doing a sick job with their software - after a bit of a lull save Garageband, they have thrown off Pages, Keynote, Aperture, and iWeb, which are four amazing tools that are barely at the beginning of their lives, but will undoubtedly become some of the most important software platforms of the next decade as they gain users and the code evolves.

So it is with only a couple grains of salt that I pass on this speculative account of one project Apple probably has in the works and may release later this year. The report was in the form of a super-long comment on thinksecret by a user identified as George Homier. We know that a new phone-mac interface will debut this summer; George suggests that it will have more features that most of us expected. In particular, he mentions

make calls straight from your mac or pc

send fax or data during an ongoing phone call (using a new IP standard that allows color fax and much more)

high quality audio recordings and transcriptions of all your conversations (as well as text-to-speech conversion for handicapped users or people sitting in libraries or uncontrollably noisy spots)

customized voice mail messages for different callers, auto-blocking for annoyances like telemarketers and collection agencies

any number of phone numbers, any area code, total portability

wireless transmission of data from cameras and such; access and control everything through the tv

easy setup of automated menus and custom hold music like customer service numbers use

a journal to help manage what you have talked about and need to say in future conversations

a clever interface to your voicemail from any computer

an auto-dialer that helps make bulk calls and can use recorded messages (and record responses)

obviously, total integration with iChat and Apple's other apps, and full provision of all the phone features we already have elsewhere

There are a few reasons I believe this, even though I have not heard anything like it before. First, it's easy enough to program. Not easy, but easy enough. Once the main pieces are in place, the hundreds of features can fall into place without too much back-breaking work. This is the payoff of the stupendous platform Apple has evolved for putting software together without a hassle - the rock-solid bottom parts that make absolutely everything work better and faster, the things I think should factor just a little bit into their marketing. Second, Steve Jobs said in January that this is the year of the mac - and while I couldn't be much more impressed with the previews of Leopard and the iPhone, I'm sure AppleTV will be cool after they add features like recording and blu-ray, and very confident that there will be a new laptop before the wintertime, this stuff is perhaps not quite enough on its own to make a claim on the entire year. This phone platform would make it enough. To top it off, Apple should also release a huge flat tv with a full-out computer inside. (The recent step away from DRM could also go down in the history books).

Third, the iPhone announcement puts a few assumptions on the table for us. We know the reason they waited so long for a product so many were dying to see is because Steve likes his products to have a polish and simplicity and reliability that evokes the word 'perfect' far too often. In that context, this telephony software is almost implied: it hasn't been released or previewed because it isn't polished enough yet, but without it the iPhone would fail to wow its owners enough - and they'd still be tied up by twentieth-century phone issues on a regular basis when they used landlines. Also, Steve pointed out that one of the main reasons for the somewhat-unpopular exclusive deal with Cingular was that serious innovation is going to take place at the level of the standardized protocols that the iPhone will use to communicate with cell towers, to enable all sorts of things that other cell phones simple cannot achieve, in addition to the many conveniences that wireless companies simply will not let us have so they can try to squeeze more dollars out of us.

Some details I didn't mention above: the phone software may require a $50 peripheral (although I expect the phone bits to be built into the laptops before long). Also, the code name for the software might be CallCenter, a name which reminds me of the style Apple went for with BootCamp. Although code names are fleeting, I find myself hoping this one sticks, as I find it very classy despite the negative connotations of what real call centers typically do today, and very easy to fit comfortably into sentences about normal day-to-day stuff that's not computer-related. Hopefully we'll get to see it in June or thereabouts, although I could be accused of being very wishful there, perhaps to the tune of a full year. No one's going to buy vista, and by this time next year macs will seem about four times as common as they are now. So enjoy the year of the mac - it's only just started.

2007-04-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

I only recently began labeling and filtering my gmail, and it gives me a familiar feeling. Once I add a label to an email, I have the wonderful feeling that I can always be sure I have it, even if I don't put the slightest bit of effort into it at any point in the future. Gmail of course doesn't delete any of your mail, and labels based on search terms aren't a great deal different from simply searching my mail. But the feeling is motivating, and it doesn't hurt to have reminders of what to search for.
It also helps keep me from getting distracted to keep certain mail from entering my main inbox. I'll go to it when I need it, which so far has been not much.

This is the same feeling I have when using several other sites. Basecamp, Flickr, and others seem to me like they'll last a long time. When I save things in their databases, I don't worry about keeping any other copies. I know that their server will serve up as many copies as I can ever need, to wherever I ever go. Things we write on our blogs, same deal, we know those phrases can always be looked up if we don't remember exactly. The computer will repeat itself, so we don't have to.

Writing and using open source software gives you a very closely related feeling - that a problem has been solved and will never again need to be revisited. You may revisit the software to solve other problems that come up, but each advance is in some sense irreversible. Not strictly of course, but I'll speculate that once some working code is published, if a later version loses capabilities, the useful old versions will usually stay available in some way or another. Certain open source programs have been used billions of times and have solved a lot of the problems that billions of different users have had - and each one only had to be written once by one person. That gives him a feeling of accomplishment, as well as relief and freedom - those efforts and insights will never again be needed to solve those particular problems.

What I want to do is bring the two even closer together. I want my code creation to be, like my content creation, primarily done through a web browser. And I think my dream is going to come true in the next couple months. Lighthouse, a new site for code management, was designed to be interoperable with whatever add-ons users could write up, so a web interface that lets me make edits and commit them to the repository is probably possible. The only issue is whether ActiveReload will let us users keep a working copy of our code on their disc space so that the idea would play out the way it's supposed to. Actually, I believe they're comfortable storing whatever files we like, perhaps the real question is whether we can run a subversion commit command from their server (so people downloading the code would get all the updates made via the web site).

Already many open source libraries can be read through browsers, but I don't know of any that can be edited there. Similarly, most cannot be executed there. Every web site is an exception to this, but many programs require users to download the code themselves if they want to run it and get output from it. In some cases sending the code uses more processing power and bandwidth than just running the program and giving the user their answer would. And I think that we'll see more and more of the latter, which has the benefit of only needing one copy of the code. As Ruby takes over the programming world, most projects will find their way onto Lighthouse, more of them will find expression in a web page or server of some kind, and we'll be down to one step. Just type the code into the browser and it can be used right away, the world over and as many times as necessary. I have edited a live ruby web site in a terminal, so yeah, it's already possible to get zero-turnaround gratification. But I'm looking forward to the impending moment where open source is not just a library but a running resource that I can utilize fully without administering, and can be browsed and edited like a wiki.

2007-03-01T18:16:00.000-08:00

Not sure if I'll be among them, but a lot of folks I know are getting the chance to buy macs these days. A lot of people ask me for advice on how to configure it. RAM is always nice, but I've started to really think that the most important component is the hard drive. My own experience makes me think that this single component has probably the greatest effect on the lifespan of the machine, and my technical knowledge backs this up easily.

You know that RAM is the temporary storage your computer uses to hold the data it's working with at any moment. But there's never enough, and the hard drive is used for this purpose as well. The files that the operating system creates for this purpose are often very big - and it all works a lot better if you have plenty of spare room for them on your disk. If you don't, the drive has to work even harder by erasing the bits you've expired and splitting new files into bits that fit into the cracks. Your performance will be a lot faster if you keep a few gigs free for whatever extraneous files happen to come up.

One way of looking at it is this. Your computer goes through three stages of hard drive space: plenty, enough, and scarce. The performance of the computer changes, and the behavior that it will tolerate changes as you move from one stage to the next. I don't need to explain why it's much better if you can postpone the last two stages - this is why I recommend 300gb drives for anyone who buys a laptop.

These drives are pretty expensive - they cost more than the larger drives used in desktops. And in the new macs you can replace them yourself, so if you find one cheaper elsewhere that's a good option. You need a 2.5 inch drive - I assume any one will work but I'm not sure about that. I'm also not sure what consequences using a third-party drive has on your Applecare contract. But with the upcoming Time Machine technology in Leopard, hard drive failures look to be far less ominous from now on.

That's my other advice - wait until the new OS is out. My first mac was purchased just before Jaguar, and they gave me a deep discount when the OS came out. My second mac was right before Tiger, and they offered no such discount. I had to locate the OS myself (I did not pay though, there's no copy protection on OSX). Leopard should be released this spring. Some of you can't wait, and that's no problem - you'll either have to pay for the upgrade (130) or just find someone with the disc.

So when you buy a mac, splurge on the hard drive, the ram, and possibly the support contract. Then you're set for life. I know the price goes up to 2 pretty fast, so be prepared. But don't cheat yourself out of two good years or more by skimping on the hard drive. Good luck!

2007-02-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

The intellectual property landscape in software is distorted. Things are permitted that should not be, and things that should be are not. The rules contain no more than a semblance of fairness.

Computer code never has a physical structure or any contextual preference, the only unique thing about it is the set of instructions it embodies. So each patented item is conceptually equivalent to a mathematical equation such as

1 x 4 x 8 x 12 = 384

One of the maddening details is that you can be found guilty of infringement whether you copied your work from another, or just figured it all out yourself. Even if you were the only one who truly invented it, another could copy your work and patent it, then try to use that to bring you down. And unless the court believed your story, they could bring you down, because in software you can set a license fee as high as you like. Of course, some defendants can't even weather the initial legal fees.

The lawsuits really mess up the industry. They punish a lot of the wrong companies and reward a lot of the wrong companies. The concept of jealous exclusivity on an idea whose transmission can't be controlled, and whose natural replication is likely, is rather childish. And this is how the big names in our software culture are made to act. There are consequences to using software written by children.

This should be a good time to be a software developer. Computers are ubiquitous, users are very open to the idea of extending their efficiency through software, the tools for creating code have never been this good, nor have the resources for quickly learning how, authors are abile to profit swiftly and from wherever they are, significant wisdom has accumulated from the first generations of software. And it is a reasonably good time to program for the web. But the marketplace for desktop software should contain many many more medium-sized companies, rather than a few huge and a lot of small. And those working on great software should be allowed to focus on their problems rather than be distracted by trying to figure out which ideas have been used before and which need to be patented.

I suppose I can't say what it would be like if there were no patents or copyrights on software. Even as is, it's very difficult to make money off your code. The market would be shaped very differently, so maybe it would to profit be a lot easier in a world where anyone could use whatever code they liked. There are a number of reasons to think so. But overcompetition could also be a strong force that opposed organization, which is very important for certain aspects of a personal computer system. This is probably why the government feels comfortable playing along with the facade of an intellectual exercise that Microsoft and Adobe and others play out in their courts - because they fear that the comfortable ordered desktop might not survive otherwise.

Software is naturally no different from any other mathematical idea - its use doesn't have any direct economic implications or restrictions in almost any of the ways that tools fashioned from actual materials do. Thus to make money off of it, you can either rely on voluntary payment, control distribution, or build additional functionality into your software that uses some clever trickery to make sure you've been paid. For software that takes the latter route, these strategies can have dubious consequences. For example, whenever you use Windows, it spends some percentage of its computing power to determine whether you've paid for that exact copy, and at any moment it could potentially decide that you had not, and refuse to perform the instructions you asked of it. This module doesn't add any positive value from the customer's perspective, and the annoyance of dealing with it makes it yet harder to establish an eager customer base. These tactics, when indelicately implemented, knaw at the trust that users want to bind them to their software's authors; they change the answer to the question "Why have I paid for this?". Using software you purchased on a machine you purchased, you would want the answer to be, "because I value what it does for me." Yet when using this type of software, the answer becomes "because if I had not paid it would jealously investigate that fact and scornfully cripple itself."

Many programmers have contributed their efforts without any attempt to obtain compensation, largely because they're not game for tying tricks into their work to make it profitable, and largely because the illogical consequences of the intellectual property court shenanigans are revolting. For much of the history of computing, code could be distributed in a form not readily readible or reworkable (compiled and ready for use), so going a step further and sharing the code was unnecessary and generous. These days, programmers often take advantage of the cornicopia of established computing tools by writing in scripting languages that have more last-minute capabilities. These languages, such as Ruby, cannot usually be compiled, so the code can only be used by people who have it in readible form (its initial and only form). This seems to have created an environment of even greater sharing and openness in the Ruby community; new projects in this language are usually assumed to be free of license fees and open sourced.

There is a way to allow users access to the output of Ruby scripts without revealing the scripts - serving the scripts on a web site. This usually doesn't offer users the flexibility of actually running the code on their own machine and altering whichever components they wish; but it is a powerful practice and rightfully common. Ironically, in many of the cases where this technique is employed, the valuable and potentially proprietary component is typically not the scripts, but the data they process, which nowadays is usually stored in a language-independent database. So, although there is nothing to stop programmers from bucking this trend, much of the value in most web sites has nothing to do with any of the code, and is only unique to that site because the database password is kept secret.

As we are cruising through a web 2 honeymoon, most of the services available online are free of charge at this point. As we progress, we will likely see many attempts to leverage various services in exchange for different forms of compensation. We can only hope that this is carried out in a way that doesn't annoy the hell out of us all.

2006-11-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

I recently enjoyed a film about the Cosmos, a football team that represented New York (their name was a take-off of the Mets) in the North American Soccer League in the seventies and early eighties. The league started out with sides that were amatuer by European standards, and meager audiences to match. But the Cosmos were owned by a very wealthy man who enjoyed the hell out of the whole culture of football and the thrill of managing a team. Rather than let the league fold into bankruptcy or struggle along with no pace, he sought to hire Pelé, who had just retired from his club of two decades, Santos. Pelé was wooed by the chance to bring the game to millions of fans who were woefully unaware of the entertaining fixtures going on in Europe and South America, among other venues. It worked - Pelé's presence brought fans by the tens of thousands wherever the Cosmos went, and some other teams began augmenting their rosters with retired Europeans and more international players. I believe the Cosmos went the furthest, eventually fielding an all-foreign team that featured Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia, the Italian striker who came in 1976, at the peak of his career, and would eventually hold the league's record with 192 goals. Chinaglia had tremendous chemistry with the team's owner, Steve Ross, and he became obsessed with guiding and managing the team himself. His ego made him jealous of Pelé, whom he really wanted to outdo. One would think that this attitude had a large effect on his willingness to pass the ball during countless scoring chances, and could really hurt the team's competitiveness. Their massive talent, however, helped them to win bunches of games anyway and several championships.

For a while, the team flourished. They were eventually allowed to play their home games at Giants Stadium, and their fans were numerous enough to fill it. ABC covered the league for, I believe, one season. Pelé's massive talent and childish smile had done the trick. The team traveled the world after their seasons, dueling the established clubs of the old world. But Chinaglia's childish rationalizations were their undoing. His influence on Ross seems to have alienated his teammates and helped Pelé decide to retire again after '77, his third season in his new home. The 'Mos were still able to win championships, but the league, which featured as many as 24 teams in its later years, folded in 1984. Then I was born, my generation was herded through youth leagues, and now the US team is far more prepared to have a shot at a World Cup, and our audiences are more able to enjoy the conversations that take place each week in the Premier League and the Bundesliga and beyond. Only two of the 11 MLS teams are profitable now, but the league seems to be growing at a healthy pace, and the rest of the teams will hopefully be in the black within five years. The primary factor cited by The Washington Times in this prediction is the use of soccer-specific facilities. Many teams borrow their pitch from local NFL or MLB clubs, or college campuses. But the two teams that made a profit this year, LA and Dallas, play in soccer-only facilities, which is apparently not a coincidence. Although I'd imagine it cheaper to rent space than pay the full costs of maintenance, I can see how the cumulative effects of the compromises involved could obstruct progress, take some of the purity out of the crowd's emotion, bother and even injure the players, and impose second-class-tenant penalties that include ruling out the best time slots. The frustration of leasing is obvious, and the quote that Commissioner Don Garber gave for the article was a clear plea for construction. He claimed that his franchises would "never" be able to break even or turn a profit in venues they couldn't control.

The idea of building these stadiums is surprisingly appealing to me, even though I normally balk at the prospect of spending huge wads like that. The success of a few baseball and football owners seems to have convinced many others that 'everyone is doing it', and they are each entitled to a show-stopping facility built largely at taxpayer expense. There are economic arguments, of course, the most notable being the drastically greater income from the luxury boxes that are sold to corporate egoists and who knows who else. But the insistence upon public funding is certainly a problem, especially since our great cities have many other investments that are competing for those dollars, and that patience. Also, although there are several technologies that can have a nice impact on the stadiums being built now, I feel that the timing would be even better in the next decade, when more techs are mature and there are significantly more opportunities to leapfrog old ideas and make the fan experience far more enhanced. Yet this is one reason I like the soccer plan - if ten or fifteen new arenas are built in the next decade, they'll have a uniformly high level of comfort, security, and modern architectural beauty. And once they are in place, forces may align to foster the emergence of a minor league, or even open amatuer leagues. My generation will be as old as most of the pros, and I'm sure we'd enjoy nothing more than getting to play some matches on their pitch, and then purchase blu-rays of the games. And leagues like this would meet a number of hugely unmet demands for social ingredients that our culture is lacking. The other thing that justifies the idea of stadiums to me is that they are not replacing existing facilities. These cities don't have massive soccer fields, and we don't know what the fan base would be like if they did. The choice of home field certainly seemed to have a huge effect on the profitability of the Cosmos.

The other thing that spelled the demise of the NASL was its loss of its TV contract after one season with ABC. The point that usually comes up in this argument is that soccer doesn't have natural stoppages of play like hockey, basketball, football, and baseball do, and therefore the revenue from commercials is threatened. European teams advertise right on their jerseys, but this is a step most MLS clubs have tried to avoid (probably to assert equivalence with the other American leagues). But I don't think the stoppage argument is correct. Fouls and injuries stop play consistently, even though they don't stop the clock. But let's assume that on average, ten or twenty seconds elapse between the whistle and the free kick. To me, bumping it up to 30 seconds, and running a single commercial in the meantime, is a great compromise. This way advertisers would get a lot of eyes, as opposed to the current model where they run all their commercials at halftime, and it's easy to just leave the room for twenty minutes. The only advertising they do during each half are those annoying named features like "the T-Mobile man of the match". Except in the MLS they can't even get that term right, they usually call him the MVP instead of the 'man'.

So, whether the clock stops during commercials or not, the compromise seems easy to swallow, the players would get a little more rest so they wouldn't have to play as dirty, and wouldn't have to fake injuries. I also think that replay should be used to evaluate any foul the ref pleases - he should have a handheld device that lets him view all the camera angles immediately afterwards. This might lead to some delayed calls, but they are already a part of the game via the advantage rule and passive offsides, and this sacrifice I consider a pittance compared to the benefits of less diving, less blown calls and makeup calls, and consequently less negative emotion. When the entire TV audience and even the stadium audience is certain to see the replay and know pretty clearly which calls were correct, to not give the ref this option is setting him up for embarassment, a circumstance which must weigh on his mind during the action and can't help his focus. There is nothing shameful about wanting a second look, now that it is so simple to provide. On a related note, it would be really sweet if they ramped up the number of cameras and angles they use to cover these games. Then we could always see shots from the shooter's back, and really know how close they were to the target. Also it would help us know which kicks were bent the most, always cool to see. And HD coverage of these games will really be something spectacular, because the ball is big and detailed enough to see exactly what the footballers are doing to it, and it to them. Very enticing.

So as the MLS grows to 16 teams, with the twelfth taking up residence in Toronto next season, we'll get to see if the corporate bigwigs will coax it through to solvency and parity with the mindshare of the four other big box team sports, or if they'll repeat the shy, cautious tactics that sank the NASL shortly after my natal day. I hope that league didn't disagree with me, but I'm sure of my compatibility with this new one - it's named after me.

2006-11-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

"Brothers is whack by popular demand"
Snoop declares at the opening of track 21, Conversations with Stevie Wonder. Some of the twenty other tracks on Snoop's new album may not be this charming. But a number of them are quite excellent, deepening Snoop's groovy sound to some new places, and covering more intellectual ground than even I expected. Snoop delivers so many positive messages on this album that I don't think anyone could disrespect him if they listened to the whole thing. Unfortunately the first single, Vato, may obscure his perfection as a role model from those unfortunate who don't get to hear the full record.

A few weeks before I just recently heard about this release, I had been thinking that Snoop Dogg was a hero because he taught people to say what they think and never be embarrassed. I feel vindicated, because he lays down such a wise manifesto on this new platinum-rimmed effort that I think it will now be far easier for everyone else to see what I meant. He offers the best of himself to pretty much everyone, including his former rival gang, if my reading of his repeated mention of 'blood' in My Peoples is right. Its juxtaposition with 'cuz', a name that, like 'uncle' and 'nephew', Snoop frequently uses to express affection, is the main reason I'm unsure; blood could be referring to generalized kinship, as if Snoop treats his friends just as well as his family, or refuses to let familial prejudgement prevail. It doesn't always work out, and there is some violence on the album, but its always in the vein of self-defense, emphasizing the code of respect that is too absent in our culture. And to clarify his stance on real-life violence, Snoop assumes the banner of Tookie Williams in The Real Talk.

I'm more than a general/
no longer a criminal/
me and Tookie Williams for real/
we were identical/
he took me to the pinnacle/
[brief Schwartzenegger dis]...
you heard what I said/
you thought that he was better off dead/
but his teachings and doctrines is what I'ma spread/
I love leading those/
who love to be led and I love feeding those/
who want to be fed...
In the memory of/
we gon' educate the kids

Snoop even addresses issues of sexism, suggesting that he sometimes does have feelings for women, and doesn't entertain conventional biases about arbitrary things like race and appearance. Far from the cold-blooded exploitation detailed by other rappers, Snoop gives credit to women who respect themselves, claims to enjoy talking with and appreciating women, and his appetite could be interpreted as a salute to the gentle sex. "We been drinking, having fun, me and you, one on one, doing things, holding hands, makin plans, I'm your man", from Which One Of You, may be pretty tame for a pop song, but for the rap genre, this is quite an admission. Snoop consistently demonstrates that he doesn't fret about what anyone thinks, and he'll treat you great if you don't give him a pressing reason not to. He has a high standard of respectful behavior, and he's earned the blessing he gets from Stevie at the end of the Conversations (you did listen to it by now, right?).

Interestingly, one of the last tracks I downloaded was Intrology, in which I've just now heard the lines

Whenever I'm making a record I'm getting into my character and I'm tryin to portray something that I'm feelin's where the whole world can believe in it.

So it would appear I'll have company in my claims, ha ha. That's okay. It's always okay to agree with my posts. But do treat yourself to this album, even if you're not accustomed to rap. Almost all the lyrics are easy to understand, and the backing music is beautiful and doesn't suffer the cliches of the genre. Also check out his new book.

2006-11-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

"So if foreign leaders are celebrating, I think they underestimate the American democratic system."

-Tony Snow, 11/10/06

He may not have Bush's way with words, but this tidbit will be fun to bat around, trust me. It will only take a few minutes.

He meant that the congressional makeover won't cripple our ability to deal with 'enemies' and 'threats'. This was the response that occurred to him when a reporter suggested that leaders of Iran and al-Qaeda had expressed joy at the Democratic victory. He assumed that they were celebrating because they could now behave more violently without as much danger of blond crusaders shooting them up. And I suppose I believe that there are some Arabs out there who probably do think so. But the Iranians, and I believe most members of al-Qaeda, have a very different rationale for celebration.

Iran is pretty concerned about what's going down to their left, but I don't believe that they have any real hostility towards the US. They are worried by the lack of respect that has been shown to other nations by the US and Israel. This concern is the progenitor of questions like why the 6 million figure and holocaust concept are so favored when the death toll of the war was many times this. This does not amount to denying the holocaust, as some have suggested. We don't seem very dignified when we keep close count of our own dead, and 'overlook' thousands of the natives who've been lost. The 600,000 figure may be very heavy for Bush to think about, but he should pay a little respect to the victims of his re-election strategy by admitting that it may be accurate. His dismissal sends the message that he could run roughshod over many many lives without even realizing, let alone reconsidering, the consequences.

For Iran, the Democratic takeover is a signal that less paranoid hawkish attention will be directed their way (well, there will still be a fair amount, but a smarter, more respectful policy would quickly change their behavior to a form that wouldn't sustain the fearmongering that the republicans are apparently still not satisfied by). I know it will be tricky for our leaders to accept that sanctions are pointless, and Iran's nuclear program will continue. Yet I think that the planned ouster of Bolton is a step in this direction. If we manage to show respect to Tehran, they may decide not to spend the obscene amounts needed to develop nuclear weapons (for the time being, their program appears to be totally focused on the nonviolent applications of nuclear tech). And this is one good reason for them to celebrate the Democratic election.

For al-Q@da, the comprehension of their feeling begins with the admission that despite pretty good intentions, the US is not a consistently 'good' state without a history of grave mistakes. Some of 'our' past decisions, like for example, the empowerment of Saddam, Osama, and the Taliban, and the 1953 oil-grab whose consequences included the dismantling of Iran's democracy, have had some sad side effects on the people who live there. I really believe that a young man could join a cell without any "hatred of freedom", or any desire at all to see anyone hurt, simply because he was sincerely concerned that the US government badly needed a forceful reminder that it can't simply get away with what it please. Such a fighter could celebrate a Dem win as one that could obviate a lot of violence, a lot of 'reminders'.

Unless I'm seriously mistaken, every foreign leader should vigorously celebrate the election.

saucy moves

2006-09-14T22:30:00.000-07:00


Bambi's handles are unheard of

2006-09-13T22:31:00.000-07:00

I presume a lot of people are dreading the election because of all the complaints and accusations they anticipate from the losers. Most of us expect the machines to mess up. You can say they're secure enough, but can you say you don't expect allegations of fraud? The past two elections have had plenty, and millions of us are just dying for someone to get caught red-handed.

Now, as firmly as I believe that the elections of 2000 and 04 were rigged, I have to admit that there may be enough safeguards in place, and enough public vigilance, to identify all fraud attempts and manage to count every vote. Still, I am certain that there will be a fiasco or twenty in the weeks after the election involving disputed results, unrecoverable votes, and statistical anomalies. Elections are still being stolen in the internet age; don't think for a second that we're beyond that. It happened in Mexico, our most volatile neighbor, and we just let it slip into the wrong hands (well maybe that one's still salvagable, I don't really know). It happened here, and we paid the price. And I think it almost happened in Italy. Probably other spots as well! With so many hotshot programmers on the globe now, sophisticated fraud is inevitable. And this election is the crown jewel. Stakes is high.

And you must admit this. Even the more scrupulous people you know would be tempted if they knew they could choose the winners. Myself, for example. I know that the Democratic party needs to take power right now. If the Dems came to me to ask for my blessing before they deployed technology that assured them victories in the key races, I'd think about it for ten seconds. Then I'd say they could do it if they promised to listen to what I had to say and, you know, dignify me with responses.

But even if we say hypothetically that there won't be any fraud this time, the elections will go more or less like the polls are going, and the machines won't malfunction, I would still anticipate plenty of people to make a fuss over certain elections being stolen, maliciously and negligently. I probably won't hesitate to count myself among them if the stats look fishy. After all, some of these machines probably still have the same software they were running in 2004. Me no trusty. The point is not that I don't want to have this happen. When you feel like the less popular candidate pulled a fast one, and hold out hope that your man will get back, you can develop disdain that makes you less able to make anything positive occur. Even if you let go of it eventually, the sadness that you feel when you're around the winner will weaken your chance to make a good impression on him, or form a really great alliance or even a friendship. And with such tight races all over the place, lots of people are going to be sure of a victory... only to lose in overtime. In fact, these people will make up almost exactly half our population, at least in 2008. May the best men and women win. May we all vote. And may we heal the wounds.

Now, there is an easy way to make sure all three of those things happen, in this and all elections. It's a piece of voting software which will work on the machines that counties have already purchased with HAVA cashflow. Money that came out of your middle-class pockets, that is. Lots of money for Diebold and a couple other playas who were in with the right at the right time. This software encrypts each vote and posts it online right as it is cast. This dataset is then open for anyone to analyze. The machines that have printers can print receipts for voters to take home, so they can see that their very own vote was counted properly. Yet the encryption will prevent anyone from knowing who others voted for. No votes will be lost late in the day, because they'll already be tabulated on the net. And auditors can watch them come in steadily, and notice irregularities as they happen in some more sophisticated ways as well. And best of all, no need to be uberwatchful of those paper ballots and go through those painful recounts time after time. With detailed data, one paper recount is the most you'll need to be sure, if it even comes to that. The software is trustworthy because it's open source: anyone could read the code and tell anyone else how it works. And running our count this way would save so much money compared to what we've got planned currently. A lot less officials would be needed, saving that many generous souls from the scrutiny of being thought a fraud. And the day after the election, we could all just get back to our lives without feeling guilty for not filing challenges of voting irregularities. Or feeling a different type of guilt by thinking that even if they were filed, they wouldn't be fairly settled. Or couldn't.

When we lay extensive cynicism on our government, it doesn't work very well. And each public servant's career starts with an election. If we can eliminate the cynicism surrounding elections, we can have a much better attitude towards our government, which will give us better control over it. And more people would vote! No one could ever say again that American Idol gets more votes.

There's not a ton of time until the 06 election. But technically there is still enough time to install VoteHere on all of the voting machines in the nation. It's the smart move. Is our nation mature enough to accept this?

2006-05-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

It's time to give up the nonproliferation bid in Iran. There's no way that they'll comply, and overstepping ourselves on this will just leave us vulnerable to an ax-strike on the right calf (talk about dropping someone to their knees). Iran is a power and they think that the bomb will take them to the next level. That's not something we can or should withhold from them. In many ways they're a very modern state and very tolerent, and their world-view deserves its course, especially because the additional responsibility will help them grow into a participatory state.

The hypocrisy of non-proliferation is subtle. Claiming that a nation hasn't got the right to study science is clearly bogus and unenforceable. Yet there is legitimacy in asking them to not focus their science on weaponry. In this case that request has not been heeded, and we should concentrate on cultivating a nice atmosphere rather than heightening tension and delusion. If we act like we expect them to use the bomb, they might be confused into actually doing it. If we focus rather on helping them reform their treatment of dissenters, we'll all be way better off before long. We need to laugh with them rather than laughing at them, and then when we whisper in their ear they'll be able to listen without the rest of the world noticing.

Now would be a good time for our government to admit responsibility for the ruination of Iran's democratic government in the early fifties. If we profess the idiocy of that move, we can shift focus away from "The US is right" and towards "Doing right is right". The latter will be a far more palatable sentiment, and people and states respond when they are given a "moral assignment". This is how Dr. King effected change in our world - he explicitly shared the burden with those listening and was honest about the nature of the problem. In the age of blogger the US can no longer hide the truth, so our government would do well to implement a policy that's consistent with it.

Now, it is a bit scary that a nation so engaged in guerilla tactics in Iraq will have the capability to humble our cities or forces. Yet no one in posession of a bomb has ever used it, save that one instance. With that power comes an immensely heightened sense of responsibility. Further, Iran now has a great risk of being falsely blamed if someone else set off a nuke, so they have a huge interest in cultivating a reputation that would negate that hypothesis. They may seem like they're almost strong and secure enough to continue pissing in our direction, but I bet they'd take the chance to come into friendlier terms if the US backed off from arrogant normative capitalism and Big_Bro-esque management of our history. They'll get higher off a boost from our linked fingers than from stepping on the small of our back after lopping off the right leg below the knee. That's simple. And economic sanctions are idiotic.

2006-04-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

So I talked to Thomas Friedman today. He was at Williams giving a talk to a packed Chapin Hall entitled "the World is Flat: some Second Thoughts." Rumor has it that his younger daughter just got into Williams and his talk was a little token of appreciation for President Schapiro. I was told that all the seats were full and I could watch everything via telecast in Brooks Rogers recital hall, so I snuck in the side door of Chapin with a friend. Sometimes working in the music department has hidden benefits, like knowing your way around these big lectures. Anyway, here's what happened when I went up to the mic after Friedman's surprisingly fun talk.

Me: hi. (loses train of thought for a few seconds)
TF: hi.
Me: (gets it back) I was thinking about what you said, about how we're funding both sides in the war on terror. Well, couldn't you say the exact same thing about the war on drugs? Here we are spending billions to destroy plants, and at the same time we're making those plants worth billions by banning them.
TF: Yeah. No, I agree. I don't really have anything to add... I don't know much about the war on drugs, but from everything I've heard, you're exactly right.
Me: thanks.
Old people in audience: (tepid applause)

Man, I felt like a million bucks. The big shot columnist who packed in half the town not only agreed with me, he actually deferred to my analysis. He also ended his speech with "Green is the future, Green is the new red, white and blue," probably unaware that some of us were about to head out to a Green Party meeting. Sure, his analysis still completely ignores the downside of neoliberal globalization, but I can't help respecting Thomas Friedman a little more after being respected by him.

2006-04-07T20:12:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, technology empowers the bad people as well as the good. Take terrorists, for example. Modern explosives, computers, and communications magnify the damage than an individual or a small group can do. On the other hand, technology also makes the rest of us better equipped to face such threats.

-Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids

Instapundit's point in this chapter, about individuals stepping up to make attacks harder to plan and pull off, was pretty valid. But he began it with this clumsy passage, which I just have to take issue with right now.

Setting terrorists into a group unto themselves may seem an odd place to start criticizing. He has a definition of terrorist, after all. Why not take all the people who fit that definition as an example? The reason is because that leads to lumping them together, as if their tactics and motives are in some way monolithic, and separate from ours. Now, there is something special about the tactic of killing civilians, but it's nothing that the US army is innocent of. Claiming that our troops care about civilian life but the Iraqi fighters don't is immensely disrespectful. And these fighters have little more than their pride -- it's very very important to them. Those who care about silencing their guns should consider how this can be done in ways that respect that pride and understand that its not going to admit moral inferiority.

In the past it made sense to dehumanize enemy troops, because the power structure made it doubtful that they could individually decide to give in. If there's no way to make peace with them, then regarding their humanity is merely a distraction that could cost lives. But the fighters in Iraq do have the ability to call off their offensive individually, so they should be regarded as what they are. Humans. Just like us. They're very concerned by the US's history of prioritizing oil over human rights, and they're insulted by taunts from Bush and Cheney. They're tormented by the deaths of their cousins, brothers, and friends, and they want the whole world to know that they are brave enough to stand up despite their pain. We should acknowledge that courage rather than malign them as haters of life that 'must all die'. We should demonstrate a grasp of reality that could inspire some confidence in the potential of Iraqi cooperation with the US. Because our focus should be on convincing, not slaying. There's not some fixed number of Iraqis who will oppose our force - the number is totally contingent on our behavior and the beliefs of those troubled, desperate young men. And they pay attention to what Bush says very closely. He has total capability to show them some respect. Running reconstructions in a way that employed more Iraqis would also be a strong signal as well as sound economic policy. Give people lots to do, to keep busy, so that they can slip away from the fighting and it won't be conspicuous. These troops are individuals, not privates, so they can do that. Which is what Bush needs to learn.

Believing that there are important distinctions between 'us' and 'them' is a mistake. There's no them, there's only us. We are all the same thing except for the outermost layer, which collects sunlight. And allowing that skin/hair/eyes layer to supercede our better judgement and give us excuses for inhuman behavior is deceptive in the saddest way imaginable.

Al Franken's interview of Anthony Shadid produced much of the material on which this post is based - he is a Lebanese reporter, in Baghdad, working for [a conservative newspaper] [the Post]. His own reading of the current insurgency is that it very likely sprung from an incident shortly after Saddam's fall. In Falluja, a region Shadid describes as not sympathetic to Saddam's party, but very bound up with the conservative belief that demands vendettas for certain crimes, US soldiers fired on a crowd and killed 16 civilians. One of these pages in the history book:

Basically, people were gathered and uppity. The armed forces were there, to "keep peace". The commander, who knew nothing about psychology or history, told his kids to fire. Thus the "valiant" shot (and killed) the "unknown".

It's happened in India and the US; it's a mistake that can sometimes be lived down and sometimes causes shit to really blow up. This Falluja incident (which was tactlesslly followed up with another just like it) was the latter. With US kids trading marks with Sunni, it's pretty much exactly the dilemma that Offspring warned back in the Clinton daze:

It goes down the same as a thousand before/
but no one's getting smarter, no one's learning the score

It would be one thing if each offended Iraqi would cap a soldier and call it a career. Doesn't seem to be the case. Spitting more lead into the situation is therefore a dangerous wager of the type that keeps coming back to bite you whether you win or lose. Essentially, the more blood, the more bloodlust - and as I said its not a matter of depopulating their force, it's more a matter of repopulating their force.

So am I advocating a total and immediate withdrawal? No, although Shadid's consideration of this q made me very reassured that perhaps this is our winning move after all. But I believe that our first and most important move is to show respect to the people we're "working" with over there. Forget this rhetoric about us and them. Forget this misleading vocabulary of """""terror""""". We need to give the insurgents a good reason to believe that we're not going to phuck with their oil - and I think the proper way to send that message is to disband Halliburton.

2006-04-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

Dear George,

In your column this week you displayed a very mature grasp of the distressing consequences of over-consumption. This is one of many persistent structural injustices that make those hearts bleed and bleed, and you are more than correct to identify this as a salient reason why liberals are less happy.

The question I have is how do conservatives better deal with these apparent problems? In some cases, they rationally doubt the serious nature of the problem, or the efficacy of the liberal solution. In some cases, they are convinced by the messages they hear in the media. And in other cases, they are outwardly convinced despite rational doubts. For some people, on some issues, this duplicity can rightly be described as self-delusion. In other cases, the individual is not convinced but is comfortable causing others to become naively convinced with his wordplay. Those who can do so without being nagged by their conscience can claim to be happy. Those who are nagged but don't want to reveal their sins may profess happiness and eventually convince themselves they are happy.

It's sometimes reasonable to doubt the potential of government reform, but doing so is often tantamount to doubting the spirit of the American people around you. People exert a great deal of power over each other by communicating their expectations of each other, verbally and nonverbally, intentionally and unintentionally, and these predictions have an element of self-fulfillment in lots of folks. Children see the adults in their environment behaving in certain ways, they expect their peers to rationally do the same, and they expect their peers to expect nothing less of themselves. An emphasis on tradition greater than justified by naive utilitarianism can strengthen these self-fulfilling phenomena, and indeed this may be the central aspect of conservatism (trying to conserve that which already exists, if my etymology is accurate).

You recognized that a pessimistic attitude about, among other things, the initiative put forth by the other people in the community of citizens, is likely to yield verifiable predictions. I wonder what you think would happen to the predictive power of pessimism if the entire community of pessimist conservatives suddenly switched to unabashed optimism. My concern is that acceptance of the status quo and reluctance to invest in reform is a stance that reflects a distressing disregard for the well-being of others, in our time and in the future. Perhaps liberals are not the naive ones after all; perhaps their ideas about opportunity and collective sacrifice are well-founded, and perhaps the persistent failure of certain ideals is as much a result of conservative cultural inertia as it is a consequence of true human nature. It's said that people will live up or down to your expectations. I understand that you agree on the down part, and I want to hear your thought on the up side.

Mr. Will, thank you for the minutes you spent reading this. Please trust that any note of reply will be eagerly read and well appreciated.

-Mike

2006-03-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

Once I realized how much could be said with so few words I knew I had to start publishing. Before long I'll be able to call a publisher-daemon, dictate my book, use the keys on the cell to move back and forth, editing and replacing, and then publish just that easily. People have stopped reading books while they're on the move, but if they could stream books and spoken pamphlets to their phone I think there'd be a huge demand.