I'm Just Sayin'

Must-read for all developers

2012-01-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

The 7xx range of HTTP status codes. I've had a use for many of these.

Good thing we're not in the Middle Ages anymore

2012-01-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

Otherwise we might have to put up with this kind of shit.

What's offensive now?

2012-01-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

So some marines are in trouble for peeing on the bodies of some folks that they killed. Watch the video where the newz d00d says that the "offensive bits" are blurred out.

Let's pretend this is a children's magazine (and some magazine it would be!) and we're supposed to be listing the things we see in the photo:

Marines occupying a foreign land
Dead, bloody bodies
Urination taking place, onto said bodies
Penises.

Clearly, 1-3 are cool, but 4 is just... OFFENSIVE.

Two layers of fail here. Fail the first: If you kill me and then pee on me, it's the killing that'd bug me far more than the peeing. Fail the second: the offensive part of an image of marines desecrating their kill is... the desecrating and the kill. Not the penis.

Now if you'll permit a sweeping generalization: nothing says "AMERICA" like the intersection of ultra-violence and prudishness.

A nice introduction to yak shaving

2012-01-10T10:31:00.001-08:00

Can be found here.

How to set an alarm clock

2012-01-09T11:12:00.001-08:00

Giles instructs.

Nuclear: Safe energy, or Safest Energy?

2012-01-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

Consider this. Of course Chernobyl makes for better TV than a bunch of individuals dying from lung cancer. Humans are VERY vulnerable to availability bias. So... we get what we get.

Pulse reader - from awesome to fail

2012-01-05T22:36:00.001-08:00

Pulse reader was a pretty cool app for ios and android. RSS has been done a bunch, but they had a cool ui for mobile devices so I bought the app.

A couple weeks ago, the app started hounding me hard to upgrade. They had a new catalog feature or something for finding new content.

I didn't care about the catalog feature at all. The app was great as it was, though i guess I wouldn't have complained if they fixed the bug where every once in a while the "sent to instapaper" feature would suddenly start to fail silently. You only knew its happened when you logged onto instapaper later and noticed the missing stuff. That's another story though.

So the hounding was pretty persistbent. Every time you opened he app,it blocked you with a modal dialog making sure that you still knew about their catalog thingy. No option acknowledge and not be shown again - you got it every time.

So I finally get pissed enough that I give in and upgrade, promising myself to never use the stupid catalog thing out of protest. This is a pay app, I'd refer less hounding.

I have no idea what the catalog is, I haven't used it. I do know however that the app crashes whenever I try to view an article. Which is really what a reader is all about. Reading articles.

So now I have a catalog thing that I guess I could use to discover new content that I could add to be reader and then... Not be able to read.

Some product manager somewhere thought this was a good way to build a band or something, but in my case it's doing the opposite.

Can haz downgrade? Or maybe I should switch to a less hostile app..

First world problems... I shall take my traveler's checks to a competing resort...

The Base Case

2011-11-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

"Inequality of outcomes is okay, I just think we need to work on equal opportunities."

If you haven't heard that sentence, you've never been to a SWPL dinner party. Good for you. =)

Really though, there's a theory that where you end up is a function of where you start. I amend that theory by saying that where you end up is a function: outcome = f(start, effort, luck).

Anyhoo, follow these threads for a while and you get to a oft-asked question: If we were to set everyone to zero, what would outcomes look like?

Well, here's World Of Warcraft to help. (tl:dr: WoW has a pretty high degree of wealth inequality)

WoW has some nice properties. Everyone starts out at the same point. Luck is a factor but over the timelines that folks play, not a major one. So we basically "control" for start and luck and take a look at "effort." Maybe "effort" isn't a good word, but the thing that remains depends strongly on the actual actions of players. What sort of actions separate folks? Some ideas:

Number of hours played
Cooperation with others (finding and maintaining membership in a good guild)
Desire to earn gold in the first place, compared to other goals such as PvP success, world exploration, raiding, etc.
Initial character build choices (n.b., a limited amount of rebuilding can occur even for "older" characters, and many players play with multiple characters).

It should be obvious how well these factors map to real world considerations. If you asked me to guess someone's career earnings, I could do worse than to ask these four questions:

How hard does he work?
How well does he work in teams?
Is he motivated by money?
What is his education and work history from college through his current job?

Of course this is the real world, so "who are his parents?" and "does he have an uncommon surplus or deficit of luck" enter into things as well.

Maybe that explains why the US has an even higher degree of wealth inequality than WoW does...?

On the Amazon Kindle Fire

2011-11-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

Spotted in the internets:

Playing with it for a while, it’s obviously worth $200, but it makes you realize that the iPad 2 is worth $1,000.

Bass Police

2011-11-14T16:03:00.001-08:00

It's highly unlikely that you'll regret listening to this:

Steve's Sister's Eulogy

2011-11-02T10:13:00.001-07:00

is here. In case you were curious.

Android == IE?

2011-11-01T14:23:00.000-07:00

I was just getting cranky with Apple for not supporting iOS5 on the 3+ year old iPhone 3G. And then I saw this. I guess the problem of supporting new stuff on legacy hardware is an issue for every one.

It's like supporting IE: it doesn't matter what the newest version can do if all your users are 2-3 versions back.

HT: rounded corners.

On valuation

2011-10-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

Say I work for a widget-making company. I make widgets.

Now, when I say widgets, I probably mean that I "add value" somewhere in the widget-creating process. It's not like there's a pile of widget ingredients on a shelf and I roll up to the shelf, pull some down, and then an hour later there's a widget that was produced entirely by my own agency. Widgets roll down the line. By the time they get to me, maybe they're like 55% done. My job is to use a few fancy, expensive, purpose-built tools to get them to 58% done.

How much should I be paid? To rephrase, let's ask: how valuable am I? Am I responsible for 3% of the value of each widget created? Well, without the fancy tools (which I probably can't afford and probably wouldn't have invented), I wouldn't be able to add that 3% value. Without the people before me, I wouldn't have had a half-a-widget to which I COULD add value. Without the people after me, we'd have 58% of a widget. 58% of a widget probably sells on the open market for about as much as 0% of a widget does. Without the process engineers that planned out the line, none of the people before or after me would have anything to do. If we want to keep going, without the lawyers and the accountants and compliance engineers and such, our widget-making enterprise might get shut down by the SEC, or the EPA, or some other regulatory agency.

Taken in isolation, I'd produce nearly zero value. Without the remaining infrastructure of my widget-making company, it's unlikely that I'd be able to produce even a single widget, ever. If widgets were baskets or clay pots or or knit sweaters, maybe I could. If they were medical devices though, or cars or iphones or smoke detectors or cans of pringles, I couldn't. Not even one.

This near-zero value isn't just particular to me though. The worker to my left and the worker to the right are in the same boat. The process engineer wouldn't be too useful if there weren't someone sitting right in my seat, executing his or her carefully crafted plan for taking a widget from 55 to 58.

Let's throw a curveball though: what happens when the company buys a newer, fancier, even more expensive, purpose-built widget-crafting tool? I used to be able to move 10 widgets an hour through my station, but now I can move 20. Then the process engineer finds a way to combine my step with the step of the guy after me without it taking any extra time. So now I can move 40 widgets!

Am I four times as valuable? In an 8 hour shift, I add four times as much value! I went from 30 widget-percentage-points an hour to 120! On the other hand, my increase in productivity came from a tool which I didn't invent and couldn't afford, and a process improvement that wasn't my idea.

And what about the guy to my right? I'm doing his job now, so he's not even around any more. In the beginning, he and I looked like we were both equally productive, but now I'm four times as productive and he's not productive at all? What happened here?

At the end of the day, my company is more productive. If similar developments hit the rest of the line, we'll be making four times more widgets without fewer workers. From our CEO's perspective, we invested in capital (the tools) and R&D (the process engineers). The increased throughput is the return on that investment.

That's great econ 101 stuff right there, but where does that leave me when it comes time to discuss a raise? And what about the dude to my right who's now unemployed? This sounds like a great story if you're a process engineer at a widget company. Or a process engineer at the company that makes our fancy, expensive, purpose-built tools. Or the CEO, who gets a bonus due to the increased throughput. Or a shareholder, who gets a dividend from the increased profitability of the company. Or a widget consumer, who probably pays less for widgets now. It's not a great story though, for a widget maker like me or my right-hand dude.

What happens to my wage as a result of the productivity increase? Well, it probably goes down. Right-hand dude is unemployed now. He'd like my job if he could get it. Increased competition from all the right-hand dudes out there drives labor supply up, which drives wages down.

So it's a great time for widgets. Widgets are more popular than ever. We're selling more than ever. Widget companies are more profitable than ever. But it's a terrible time for widget value-adders like me.

That's the kind of situation that leads to graphs like these. The sort of thing that just makes you want to... occupy something. It just feels unjust.

What's the just solution though? If I get a magic wand, what would I do?

Make my company re-hire right hand man? For what purpose?

Make my company pay me more? How much more? Why? Why do I deserve more when right hand man is the unemployed one?

Should the government tax our widget company more and pay the money to the unemployed? How much more? Why?

What do the widget company and/or the government owe me or right hand man? On what basis would that valuation be calculated?

Are you in the 1%?

2011-10-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

I presume that the 99%-1% divide is intended as an index of USA income. Of course my belief that countries are social fiction makes me want to consider the world wide numbers.

I found this kinda out-dated and sorta-sketch indication. It says that the top 1% is anyone making more that 47K a year. More than 25K puts you in the top 10%.

You can check yourself with their tool here.

Let me know if you find a better source.

*For the metaphorically inclined, I'm not trying to suggest that someone with 37 kids and a mortgage and an income of 30K annually has it great and has no right to complain or some such. Anyone can complain if they want to. Just remember how you feel when those richer than you complain, and then take a second to realize how rich you are too...

It's just...

2011-10-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

One of my "man, if I had a nickel for every time" things is describing new tech as "just" *insert old tech + some new improvement here*.

The iPad is "just" a big iPod touch. Yeah, 10 hours of battery life and a perfectly-sized screen for an airplane, a couch, a chair or the bathroom? Maybe that's a good thing.

The Porsche Panamera is "just" a stretched out 911. Yeah, 0-60 of a sports car and it fits the family plus luggage? Well, that sucks.

Siri is "just" a voice recognition tool paired with a context-aware AI engine and embedded into an OS. We've had voice recognition, AI and OSes before, so I guess that's not cool either.

Beer is "just" water, hops, malt and yeast. Who would care about those?

Kids, everything is made of something else. Wholes are greater than the sums of their parts. Next time you find someone making a bajillion dollars selling something that's "just" a combination of other things that already existed... Be happy that they came up with an awesome new combination of things and unleashed it upon the world for your fucking enjoyment.

I feel like our entire globalized capitalistic system is working in overdrive trying to create awesome new things that would seem like magic beyond the wildest dreams of someone even a few decades removed from now, and all the tech community can muster in response is "meh, Simpson's did it."

Spoiled brats. =)

Poignant comics

2011-08-08T23:13:00.001-07:00

Can be found here. HT Devin.

DoL LoL

2011-08-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

So the economics profession has been managing their job postings online since 2001. The Department of Labor has regs about print advertisements, though. In order to protect domestic applicants, you have to advertise in print before being "forced" to hire qualified international candidates.

So now they're going back to print.

One inefficiency (protectionism) deserves another (wasting resources on a dead tree edition).

Anyone know if this is a true story?

2011-07-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

I heard it attributed to Milton Friedman...

"...Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

Some things are worse than other things

2011-07-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Raping a maid for instance, is a bad thing. Ordering the deaths of thousands is a worse thing. IOZ explains.

Most insightful OS comparison I've read in a while

2011-07-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Can be found here. For the slightly unconventional definitions of "barbarian" and "civilized," you might want to read some or all of this as well.

In fact, you should probably be reading everything that Venkat writes. No whining, no tl;dr, just do it.

Farming and Mining

2011-07-08T11:17:00.001-07:00

I've been on both sides of the farming/mining divide and I heartily recommend the former over the latter.

Earth with Rings

2011-06-23T23:10:00.001-07:00

Pretty neat thought experiment.

It's Over; We lost. No Wait... We Lost, but it's NOT Over?

2011-06-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

A bunch of ex-politicians and policy guys say that the War on Drugs is lost. It is and it has been. On the matter of the legalization of marijuana, the "science" is settled. Those who continue to support legalization are on par with the flat earthers or birthers. These are folsk whose commitment to a view exists entirely independent of observed reality.

40,000 fatalities in Mexico. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world (n.b., some doubt China's figures, so maybe we're number two?). The trillions of dollars down the drain.

This isn't a matter of debating whether or not substance abuse is "good." It's a matter of the fact that prohibition is far WORSE than substance abuse. By a long shot. It's not even close.

Now, this report will come to nothing. We deserve the government we get because it's the government that we vote for. Not even California has managed to legalize marijuana, and it's pretty safe to say that the waste of blood and treasure will continue until the entire United States wakes up. The world will likely follow. Other nations would probably love to stop watching their citizens die in the tens of thousands due to our tilting at windmills, but the US exerts tremendous pressure on their governments to toe the line.

It's a sad, sad state of affairs. Think of what good could instead be done with those lives and that money. This is a global tragedy of huge proportion - dwarfing all the tsunamis and earthquakes combined.

If you've been voting for those who support prohibition, shame on you.

You can't rsync an entire SAN...

2011-05-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

And other new lessons for a fearless leader:

I've seen funnier things

2011-05-10T00:03:00.001-07:00

But I can't remember when.

Was he murdered, martyred or assassinated?

2011-05-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Can God make a rock that he can't move?

The important lesson here is that two wrongs make a right.

What do Jesus, MLK, Gandhi, the Buddha and the Dalai Lama have in common?

Weak on terror.

Virgin America Support: A pretty useful Twitter experience

2011-03-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

So I had a flight canceled, got some credits and tried to transfer them to my bro. The process was long, aggravating and unsuccessful: by the time we finally managed to negotiate the human-faceless megacorp divide, tickets had gone up by more than the credits were worth in the first place.

Like so many other humans in this position, I posted a juvenile rant on the internet, resolved to use other airlines in the future (not that I expected that to help) and figured that was that.

Except Virgin America responded. This blog you see, it's set up to tweet headlines and links whenever I post, through my attached twitter account. Virgin America clearly has alerts set up to monitor their online reputation and began following me shortly after my post.

I followed back.

After a week or so of high-latency (on both sides) direct-message back-and-forth, VA reviewed the situation and opted to credit my brother for the difference -- on his credit card, not simply an account for future flights. They basically left us where we would have been had the application of my credits to his flight actually worked when we first tried it.

Now, that's pretty cool. When I was posting my rant, I knew that this was the age of Google Alerts and job descriptions like Social Marketing Manager, so I did know there was an outside chance that my words might eventually hit the screen of someone in VA's employ. I didn't however expect them to respond or attempt to make things right.

So what is there to say? As an individual customer, it's pretty clear that I don't matter much to Virgin:

They strung me and the wife along at the gate for hours rather than canceling the flight. An earlier cancellation would have let me schedule a new flight in a timely enough manner to make it back on Friday. It also would have allowed a decent night's sleep before working online from Virginia. Canceling the flight costs them a lot of money, enough that looking out for our experiences was secondary. They did provide soda and chips though.
Their email contact system has an indefensible character count limit that clearly discriminates against users with my level of verbosity. Even after I edited for length, I still to this date have received no response from my two submissions through that form.
30 seconds on their phone system and you know that VA is not concerned about phone contacts being an important part of the customer interaction. It takes a while to even convince the thing that you want to speak a human and once it concedes that point, it takes FAR longer to actually make that happen. I have a decent amount of experience working as front-line support, working with front-line support and even managing front-line support. I know that putting a human at the other end of the line is expensive, but I also know that computer-human reactions are nowhere near as satisfying. Some companies pay extra in order to win this experience. VA does not.
When my wife called to explain the exact situation that I blogged about, she received no sympathy nor action from support.

On the other hand, as an online ranter, I do matter:

They responded pretty quickly after my post went live. The idea of companies actively monitoring their online reputation probably seems obvious to those who would read this blog, but I'm pretty sure there are many corps messing that up, probably even in the airline industry.
They did respond slowly, but 1) they let me know it would take a while and 2) they did respond. They had no legal need, there was no prior commitment that they were honoring. There was no explicit quid pro quo - I made no claim that I would remove or edit my rant and they didn't ask.

This behavior actually makes sense. As an individual customer, it doesn't cost them much to lose me. As a potential online influence on others, it might make sense to contain me. I'm not flattering myself here - neither I nor VA actually knows the scope of my online influnce. It's probably very low, but that's hard for them to determine and being nice in this case was quite cheap in comparison.

Of course the end-game arithmetic doesn't work out: if only squeaky wheels get the grease then customers should all become squeaky. Dealing with squeaky wheels over twitter and refunds has got to be more expensive than actually interacting with your customers in the first place. That said, the bet on their end is obviously that most wheels won't squeak, i.e., most folks will just suck it up and move on. That bet is, I think, a good one.

At the end of the day, Virgin stepped up and me and the bro are pretty happy. I'll fly with them again if they're going my way and I felt like I should write this post to pass on the rest of the story. I'll still view any potential phone or email experience with dread, but as long as I can keep things simple and just deal with the computers like I'm supposed to, I expect a pretty good experience. I'm stoked that they journeyed out to my station in the outer rim of the blogosphere in order to go the extra step to get things sorted out. And they still offer the power of flight - that's a pretty convincingly awesome thing to be purchased at such a low price.

In support of my theory that everything's awesome and nobody's happy

2011-02-24T12:31:00.000-08:00

http://xkcd.com/864/

Virgin America Support: WORSE THAN USELESS

2011-02-19T14:54:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I realized that it's been a while since I've gone on a good rant. Online rants are a fundamental part of my generation. If us internet generation folk ever have our Woodstock, it'll be an epic 3-day flame war on 4chan.

So, without further ado, my unbiased and completely reasonable accounting of my experience with Virgin America support:

So back on Thanksgiving, the wife and I try to fly back from east coast to west. We picked Virgin America. They've got the cool new planes, the TVs in the seats, the hip staff and videos, decent prices. None of the shitty service you'd expect from the older carriers that just survive on business travel (American, Delta, etc).

Flight gets delayed 90 minutes, then again, then again. I guess there was a sensor problem, the leg from LA to DC was diverted to Chicago. They said they had it fixed, then that they were waiting for a part. Then that the plane was in the air. Then that the plane was about to take off. Then that the plane was FOR REALS, in the air. Somewhere around 2AM, the plane lands and the folks from LA with the unexpected CHI layover finally deplaned. THen after an hour or so, they cancel the flight at 3AM. We'd been in the terminal for about 7 hours at that point and had a meeting in California that we were now going to miss.

Now, equipment problems happen and they suck. Airlines don't want to cancel unless they're sure that they'll have to, because canceling is expensive. So it's in their interest to string us along, and string us along they did.

Anyway, all the flights for Friday were booked long before our Thursday flight was canceled. We had to wait until Sunday to fly out. Definitely missed our meeting and had to get picked up by my brother at the airport at 4am on a Friday morning. Sucks for us and him.

Virgin America Guest Care gives us each a $100 credit that expires in a year. $100 isn't too much and we don't fly much so probably won't be able to use it, but I guess they did something.

Fast forward to now - my brother is trying to visit us. Figured we'd give him our credits. He tries the codes, no luck.

I call support and figure maybe I have to transfer them. REAL struggle to get in line for a human. Wait on hold for 30 mins or so and use their "we'll call you back" option. They call back much later, after I'm already asleep.

Next day I call again. I don't want to use the "call back" because I have a conference call in an hour and I don't want to miss Virgin's call because of my other call. After 52 minutes I give up and write an email to support explaining my situation. That was three days ago and support still has not responded.

Day after that, I call again. 7 minutes and I get a human. YES! Human says my brother needs "elevate." Virgin America calls their frequent flyer program "elevate" I guess. I suppose some inhuman marketdroid thought that sounded cooler than "frequent flyer program." Whatever. Like me, my brother is the opposite of a "frequent flyer," but I let him know that he needs to create an account.

Next day, he's created his account and sent me the number. I call but it's late on a Friday and I guess the support line is down.

That brings us to today. I call in in the morning and spend 45 minutes or so getting our credits transferred to my brother. He goes to book the flight and the four days in between have apparently caused the flight to go up by 238 dollars.

So the process cost me all of my credits. It's costing him $38 extra (well, not really - he's using a different airline...).

If support just told me that I couldn't do it and to book the flight, they'd have been useless. No help, no harm. They didn't accomplish that though - my experince COST time AND money.

They failed simple tasks like answering a phone. They failed at less simple tasks like transferring credits with expedience. They failed at the fundamental task of business - providing positive experiences for customers that would lead to customer loyalty.

At one point, I even recommended these guys to others. Now I feel bad about that. I'd like to get a list of everyone to whom I've said positive things about Virgin America and call them up in order to set the record straight. I feel like I'd need to do that in order to protect my personal reputation as a reliable opinion.

Mostly, I'm bummed because my list of Airlines That Don't Suck was pretty short already and I'm sad to see it get shorter.

I'm also amazed because, as an engineer, I figure that the hard part about flying civilians across the country in 5 hours was, you know, the FLIGHT part. Thing is though, we've nailed that. We can put thousands of tons thousands of miles up at hundreds of miles an hour and land safely, all with food, TV, internet, reclining chairs and a reasonable cost. No problem.

Compared to that, how hard is it to ANSWER A FUCKING PHONE?

/rant.

Dvorak, one year later

2011-02-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

I've been typing using Dvorak for a year now. Pre-switch querty was about 95wpm. Test today says 102 sober, 93 drunk. Not too bad.

Vim took a while to get used to. I didn't map everything so that the positions were the same - I actually learned the new positions. So the hjkl is not exactly the same. The only major change I made was that cw is mapped to cg (looking at your keyboard, that mean that change word is 'iu' instead of the harder-to-type 'i,'.

Starcraft was tricky until they allowed custom key mappings. Prior to that I had a hotkey to switch back to qwerty for that game only. My story won't be the same for others though - I play with the grid set up and a lefty mouse, so I'm pretty unique there.

The iPhone hasn't bugged me - the keyboard is too small for the different layout to compete. The ipad is a bit more troublesome but not really - I'm typing by sight there anyhow. Bluetooth keyboards connected to iPads can use Dvorak anyhow - it's just the software mapping that doesn't support it.

Switching was really only bad for a month, I'm faster (if only slightly now than before), and it's working out pretty well. If this means I'll dodge the repetitive stress so common for folks in my industry, it's worth it. Of course there's no real way to tell...

Creationism

2011-02-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

So Melch had this to say about things that I've had to say:

Apparently, I vicariously read a lot of blogs through Pinto. He was reading about the value of creation and the idea that if you’re not creating things, you’re merely using other peoples’ creations to express yourselves. I find a lot of truth to that, but I don’t think that using other peoples’ expressions to express yourself is a bad thing at all.

It takes time to develop skills. When you mix that with different levels of “natural talent” and chance, it becomes probable that somebody else will have created something that expresses you or a subset of you better than you could have.

Tumblr has no comments, so let me say this about that... here. This is unedited, so expect a bit of rambling. No, I'm not high. Perhaps I should be... =)

Firstly, the thing she's talking about is WhyTheLuckyStiff's quote: "When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create."

Secondly, Melch and I are differing a bit here at a rather fundamental: the identity of self. I took a course on this in college many moons ago, which is scant qualification to hold forth on the matter. On the other hand, this is the internet so why should I let that silence me?

When you express yourself... what exactly are you expressing? Is there some pre-existing, invariant identity that Melch merely lacks the ability to express via words, music, visual art or other means? Is it that hidden reality that will be more professionally revealed by someone else?

I propose to challenge the invariance and amend the implied direction of influence. Imagine the creative endeavor of basketball. Imagine Michael Jordan looking back upon his efforts to create in that space and thinking "well, what I did was good, but I'm glad that Kobe and LeBron have come along to more capably express what I was about."

Perhaps Michael Jordan actually did a pretty good job of expressing himself, but... what self? Did the 18 year-old Jordan possess the "self" that famously won the dunk competition with the foul line flight that lives on in every Nike sneaker that bears his name? Or did the later creativity come as an organic result of tens of thousands of hours of practice, grinding, thinking and competing?

I think the path is two-way. When you paint the canvas, the canvas is painting you. You create yourself by creating. Jordan expressed himself on the foul line using muscles that he created... by expressing himself.

Did Picasso express himself with Cubism? He had painted for decades before creating Cubism. What self was he expressing before then? Did those years simply enable him to create the language he needed to express what he had always been? Or was he a different "self" after all those years? Did the process of learning how to invent Cubism turn him into the sort of "self" that he used Cubism to express? I think it's a two way street. Picasso created Cubism and Cubism created Picasso.

Consuming is a raw ingredient for creation (think "standing on the shoulders of giants"), but it's an insufficient ingredient. If you just consume various creations of others and then say "there's nothing left to do! I'm that!" then you're not noting that they're expressing you. You're passing on the chance to create an identity, preferring instead to freeload on theirs.

I don't think anyone just "gets lucky" and finds that Picasso just happened to be expressing them too.
Cubism can't mean to you or me what it meant to Picasso. We weren't there when the canvas was blank.

This tracks back into Sapir-Whorf territory. If you find someone expressing you, is it you that they're expressing, or is it their expression that you're using to create your own identity? If you're using someone else's language to express yourself, then all you can be is whatever you can interpret from what they give you.

viPhone

2011-01-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

Posted without comment.

Dear Wikileaks haters

2011-01-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

Information doesn't kill people. People kill people.

In particular, the inhabitants of the countries we invade kill and are killed by the military forces that we have directed to invade them.

Hat tip NRA?

Imagine a spectrum...

2011-01-18T10:53:00.001-08:00

Giles hits it on the head as only he can:

Consider a spectrum of assholes. At one end you have Sarah Palin, who talks about guns as a tool of politics because she's confident in the assumption that nobody takes her seriously or literally - in other words, because, like most politicians, she's a calculating, insincere asshole. At the other end, you have the terrorist Jared Lee Loughner, who used guns as a tool of political change because, like most terrorists, he's an insane, violent asshole. What might you find in the middle if you had an asshole who was violent but not insane, and calculating but not insincere? You would have on your hands the type of asshole who you would NEVER want anywhere near computer-controlled weapons.

Anti-Nocturnals

2011-01-13T00:12:00.000-08:00

Dear designer of every productivity/scheduling and planning utility ever:

The transition between "today" and "tomorrow" is when I wake up, not midnight. If it's 12:10AM on Thursday, my "today" list should be for Wednesday.

If you're cool enough, you can let me configure the transition point. If you're not, let's settle on something reasonable like 6AM.

kthxbai

Graceless Degradation

2011-01-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

I need to bring this idea into a general Rails plug-in.

Also, "Graceless Degradation" would be a halfway decent name for a band.

Kangaroo and Kangaroo

2011-01-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

Giles knows it, Graham knows it. Just like calories, our bodies and minds rank physical possessions as more scarce than they are. The result is that we seek too many of them and end up with too many of them.

The extreme reaction is the cold-turkey diet. There's the lifestyle change theory too.

Like food, energy, information and natural resources, this is another symptom of the "good" kind of problem. Modern capitalism has been so mind-boggling successful that many in the world have a new problem: they lack the mental circuitry to handle having more than they need of so many of the things that they want.

This is definitely a problem and we post-industrial societies are going to need to find a solution, but we should all remember that it's the good kind problem. Better this than the problems encountered last year by folks in Haiti or Pakistan.

Dear programmers

2010-12-29T01:11:00.000-08:00

So you have a problem. You decide to solve your problem using regular expressions. Now you have two problems. Rubular is the solution to one of them.

The Rubular of date-time formatting used to be running `cheat strftime`. That was before foragoodstrftime.

If you've got any more solutions, let me know.

Go... away

2010-12-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

Dear GoDaddy,

The only element of your entire web interface that I find remotely usable is the Danica Patrick photos. While I appreciate your effort in that sphere, I'd appreciate it even more if every page didn't have 498746513546841 links and text tidbits on it.

Yours truly,
$sysadmin who only uses your service because his employers/clients do

Amazon vs AWS vs me

2010-12-21T16:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Amazon,

I think your wal-mart-in-the-sky emporium is awesome. I think your datacenter-in-the-sky cloud service is awesome.

I understand that the IT setup you built for the first led naturally to the competencies that allow you to kick ass at the second.

I'm happy to use both, just not at once. Pretty please, could you recognize that the account I use to purchase ec2 hours for my company and the account that I use to purchase goods for myself are not the same, even if the computer on which they originate is the same? I'd appreciate it. I don't want to pay for my company's servers and I don't think my company wants to pay for the tshirts that I'll later use to abuse the company dress code.

That is all.

Somalia's not an argument

2010-12-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

Dear the Internet,

Please consider the following thought experiment:

kthxbai

Sophistication as the opposite of Interesting

2010-12-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

This feels like a bit of a false dichotomy but I think it's a good starting point for thought. A lot of polite social conversation amounts to agreeing at one another. That feels good, but the actual transfer of information can be very low. For info-philes, that an be a negative.

On the implementation of '==' for deities

2010-12-17T21:43:00.000-08:00

So the dude who did the documentary where he ate McDonald's every day for 30 days and ruined his body, well he got a reality TV deal for a show called 30 days.

I watched the first few episodes. In one of them, a Christian dude spent 30 days living with a Muslim family in Detroit. Upon visiting a mosque, he expressed the concern that the Muslims were praying to a different God than his, and he didn't want to engage in that.

How, exactly, might one evaluate that question? If we grant:

Muslims pray to Allah
Christians pray to God

How do we know that Allah == God (or not)?

If we allowed the possibility of multi-theism, this would be simple enough. If Apollo is the sun god and Aphrodite isn't, then we're probably talking about different deities. There's a distinction in roles and genders.

But Allah and God pretty much have the same role: creator of heaven and earth, alpha and omega, &c. They even have the same gender, which is either "male" or "undefined" depending on how much modernist revisionism you subscribe to.

Now, some of the things that Allah and God have said or done might contradict one another. Like, if Allah said that there was no heaven and God said that there was, then maybe we'd be dealing with different deities.

Except: the Christian God said the thing about "eye for an eye" and then the other thing about "turning the other cheek." Those are kinda hard to reconcile. No easier anyway than it would be to reconcile the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and "Angels in the Outfield" also being the dude who spake to Muhammad that one time about that other thing.

Maybe this is one of those P vs NP things?

There once was a poet named Poe...

2010-12-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

Limerick versions of famous poems.

Wikileaks

2010-12-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

Clay Shirky has written the most sensible thing I've read yet about Wikileaks.

Even so, I think his writing fails to get all the way to the matter at hand. His thoughts on the matter operate under the assumption that the United States should operate in a legalistic, democratic manner.

Which brings us back to our old model vs reality situation.

The model of the United States as a democratic, soveriegn Westphalian nation state, bound by a Constitution and the laws of the land doesn't tell the whole truth.

Human organizations obey social truths, not legal truths. Social truths deal in trust, enmity, loyalty and hierarchy; legal truths deal in egalitarian rights and prohibitions. Social truths are situational; legal truths are universal.

Consider any human organization of which you are a member. Perhaps there is a person who on paper ought to be your manager, but whom you actually manage. Is the nominal leader of your department, company, homeowner's association, Warcraft guild or softball team actually the leader?

Constitutions and laws are legal truths. They guide but don't restrict. A speed limit doesn't keep you from speeding. It's merely one element in a long list of things that influence your driving decisions.

The United States is at or around the height of its imperial power. There might be laws or treaties that say, on paper, that we shouldn't invade other nations, kidnap folks from Pakistan, torture prisoners of war, knowingly kill civilians or extra-judiciously harass the founder of Wikileaks. Those are more guidelines than actual rules.

The gentleman and scholar Ron White once recounted a story of walking his dogs in front of a building. There was a sign in the grass in front of the building that read: "no dogs." The sign, Ron claimed, was wrong. It should have said "two dogs."

If the rules on extradition or jurisdiction contradict what the US of A is up to, then the rules are obviously wrong. The rules that matter are the social rules of hierarchy, power relationships and loyalty.

Will the international community allow us to go after this man? Most likely. Will domestic corporations respect the government's wishes and freeze assets, domains and donations? Almost certainly. Do whiners in the blogosphere like you me or Clay Shirky have the votes, dollars or guns to have a voice in the matter? No they don't.

It's not that might makes right. It's that "might" and "right" are independent matters.

Close the Washington Monument

2010-12-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Hey all, long time no post. Bruce Schneier is as good a reason to de-lurk as any, so here you go.

The TSA and the thinking that created and maintains it represent a real incarnation of what the philosophers call a "reductio ad absurdam." Rock-bottom is a different place for everyone. Taking the shoes off might do it for some, pat-downs might do it for others.

The TSA isn't the enemy of the terrorist. It's the complement. The terrorist sets 'em up, exposing a new potential threat. The TSA knock's 'em down, removing freedoms in a quixotic attempt to enumerate badness. It's a symbiotic relationship.

If a terrorist does something bad and no one runs around acting terrified, was he really a terrorist?

i of the Tiger

2010-08-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Posted without comment.

ipad + "Eye of the Tiger" from Jordan Hollender on Vimeo.

My journey through the Koprulu Sector

2010-08-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

So, I'm updating my Starcraft II (not like they give you a choice in the matter), and the kind little update window wishes me all the best on my journeys through the "Koprulu Sector."

Now, I know a LOT about Starcraft II. If I were the sort of dude that worried about his image, I'd definitely avoid admitting how much I know about Starcraft II. I know the names of professional players, the teams they play for, what they look like, what sorts of builds they favor. And this was the first I've heard of the Koprulu Sector.

The reason of course is that I've not played the campaign. The reason for me not playing the campaign is that I attempted a single mission and gagged over the dialog and voice acting. The idea is that the rough-and-tumble independent space-cowboy adventurers are taking on the fascist dictator, deploying their plucky attitudes and checkered pasts in the service of that goal. Or something like that. I honestly wasn't paying attention. The lines were terrible, the delivery wasn't over-the-top enough to be campy, but it wasn't nearly good enough to be... good. Think of the worst line you remember from Top Gun, being delivered in the manner of the worst moment of acting in the Star Wars prequels. It's kinda like that, but worse.

The matter of the campaign and the story though got me to thinking. Perhaps the reason why games like Halo and Starcraft are so popular is the rich backstory.

Take an unpopular game like chess as a counter example. Where's the story? Where's the single player? Yeah, so it's black vs white, but... WHY? Was there some ancient wrong that demands remedy on the battlefield? This 8x8 checkered realm surely has a fancy alien-sounding name, doesn't it? We know the pawns can move 1 space or sometimes two and sometimes diagonal and such, but what's their motivation? Do they have bad-ass, anti-authoritarian attitudes that the teenage male demo can relate to? Inquiring minds want to know!

Clearly chess doesn't get it. There's just no DEPTH there, you know? It's like all that happens is you have two people trying to outwit each other using a commonly known abstract ruleset as the means for their battle. Who'd be interested in that?

There are likely a few chess tournament trophies in my parents' attic that answer that question solidly, but I haven't the time to check - I'm off to the Koprulu Sector!

This should be obvious

2010-08-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

You know all those camps and bases that the logistical arm of the US military has established in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Those guys should be employed creating a safe and sanitary camp for the Hatians that currently really need one.

Just another one of those things our nation could do if it ever wanted to shift resource allocation from destruction to creation.

Trolling the Selfish Elite

2010-07-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

So there's these dudes ran some poll on Facebook and Wired thinks it means that iPad users are educated, sophisticated, selfish elites.

Dude, you can say what you want about my gadgets, but calling me sophisticated is over the line.

Anyway, let's say this about that. This study is obviously trash science at its worst. You start with sample bias and poor question design, make some sloppy inferences and then wrap it up with some sweeping generalizations guided more by the story you want to tell than the data. Like most magazines, Wired fails hard when it comes time to decide between sensationalism and critical review. Still, it's an interesting thought vector.

Some times one thing will predict another thing. In my language, I call the measured entity a "proxy" for the predicted entity. If you give me data on whether a group of folks are fundamentalist Christians, I can make predictions about their party affiliation. This isn't a "correlation implies causation" kind of thing, it's a "reliable correlation is handy because sometimes a hard-to-measure thing is correlated with an easier-to-measure thing." Political scientists occasionally call these sorts of shenanigans "Alford Indeces," after this guy.

Still, we love to find some causation. WHY would educated elites purchase an iPad? Well, that's a silly question. iPads are expensive and unessential. Pretty much the only sorts of folks who purchase that sort of thing are educated elites. I have no idea from what data they draw their conclusion of selfishness, but that label is leveled with regularity upon businessmen in our age, so it's not so surprising.

No, it's no surprise at all that folks with the means to purchase a new toy will purchase a new toy. The same trend could be found if we "studied" luxury automobile owners, folks with pilot's licenses or ran a poll down at the local $40/plate restaurant.

The surprise is how important NOT liking the iPad is to the self-image of those geeks who don't have one. The younger, poorer drivers of tuned EVOs and Civics don't hate on the drivers of M3s and Porsches. They aspire to join their ranks.

That's not so in computer-land though. For these sorts of gadget-geeks, buying an Apple product would be like that feeling you get when your favorite indy band signs with the RIAA. The "joy of tinkering" as a euphemism for braving bad UI is like the joy of drinking PBR in a hole-in-the-wall. With a self-image like that, purchasing an Apple product is almost emasculating.

Time changes things though. Young students pirate songs because they have lots of time and no money. Middle-aged professionals buy songs from iTunes because they have money and no time. Sticking it to the RIAA is just a time-consuming drag.

Take one of those "independent geeks" and give him a 90K a year salary at a tech company, a wife and two kids. Maybe he'll get an EEEPC, set it up to ssh over to his server that he built from parts purchased on NewEgg running a bleeding-edge build of MythTV and an open-source newsreader that he on-again-off-again contributes to.

Or... he'll get the iPad and use it to read shitty sites like TechCrunch in hopes of learning from their hype what the competition is doing. He'll download casual games because he doesn't have the time to sit down and get involved in anything that can't be measured in 15 minute increments. He'll give it to the kids to amuse themselves so that he can talk with his wife.

Where did all the independent geeks go? They all became iPad driving businessmen.

How much do you like freedom?

2010-07-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

So, say you have some money. All things being equal, you'd like to keep it. There are some other things that you like. Food and shelter and video games and such. They cost money. So you have a trade-off. You like milk and you like $1.99, but you'd rather have the $1.99, so you buy the milk. Your preference for $100 probably exceeds your preference for a jug of milk, so you probably won't purchase. You also probably won't purchase sour milk, even at $1.99.

Your response to these trade-offs is to set some guidelines. When spending money on a thing, you want to spend the smallest amount possible. When evaluating a thing for possible purchase, you want it to be the best thing possible. If the thing is expensive enough or low enough in quality, you don't make the trade.

Now imagine that you were a legislator who liked freedom. All things being equal, you'd want more freedom rather than less. When crafting a law, you'd want to make sure that law restricted freedom as little as possible while providing the most benefit possible. If it later turned out that the benefit didn't match the cost, you'd repeal the law.

I was just thinking about the semi-prohibition of pseudophedrine, one of the few drugs that I might hope could address a persistent congestion problem of mine.

I can purchase the stuff, but only at a few places in my area, only by giving up my name and address, and only in small quantities. Alternatives are poor substitutes. Many companies don't want the hassle of selling it, so competition is lower. Combine that with the lower counts and it's relatively more expensive then it was before the ban. That's the restriction-of-freedom side. I can't get it as easily, in as high a quantity, or as cheaply as before. Likewise, stores are less able to profit from selling it.

The reason for the restriction of course was the prevention of its use in the production of meth. The disadvantage of meth is that people use it and then get addicted and then get unhealthy and jobless and steal shit to buy meth (of course some of the worst externalities come from the fact that it's illegal - the cost is higher so more things must be stolen, and those producing, selling and consuming must engage in naturally dangerous black market activity). Anyway, the idea is that we trade some freedom in return for less meth.

Well, that's the theory, but have the legislators shown their work? Has anybody studied pseudofed restrictions to confirm or deny that they have a significant affect on meth production? What were the results of those studies?

The same question could be asked anywhere... How much safer are we now that the TSA has banned water? How much healthier are residents of cities that have banned trans-fats?

Are we buying sour milk? If we knew we were intentionally buying sour milk, it would show that our legislators don't care about freedom at all. If we buying sour milk unintentionally because we weren't checking before or after buying, well that at least suggests that they don't care that much, do they?

Gates's successor doesn't get it

2010-07-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

If even half of this is true, my theory that MS reached apex at the departure of Gates remains sound.

Market competition is good. Political competition generally is not. Android vs iOS is good. Kin vs WinMobile7 is not.

Naturally, MS makes enough from Windows and Office that they can continue to lose hundreds of millions on things they don't and probably won't ever understand like gaming, the web and mobile. Windows and Office are so entrenched that even epic disfunction on the part of their parent company can't dislodge them overnight.

Still, this is the world of Google, Apple and Amazon. MS and Yahoo just think they live in it.

What's your point, Walter?

2010-07-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

Apple has some very nice testing labs.

That would be great if their users wanted to buy things from a company that had nice testing labs.

What the customers want though... is phones that work.

I don't have an iPhone 4, but if I did, here's what I'd want to hear:

"Well, we messed up. We've got some super-awesome and super-expensive test facilities, but it looks like we need to make our process even better still. We know it's not an ideal solution, but you can have a free bumper case on us. If you've already bought one, we'll refund it. If you want to return your phone, we've extended the return period. We appreciate your business and we'll take the necessary steps to learn from this issue and continue to produce the high quality, easy to use products that you know and love"

I don't like that their official press conference addressed the competition by name either. Sell and defend YOUR product, let the competition worry about their products. If you need to get it out there that other phones have similar problems, leak it into the blogosphere and let the Engadgeters do your dirty work for you.

Imagine a kid in his most whiny voice attempting to excuse himself from a cookie jar heist by ratting out his sister for her co-involvement. Yeah, that's what the "our competition sucks too" sounds like.

Dude. We're Apple fanboys. We EXPECT the competition to suck. We expect, even to the point of complete irrationality, Apple to be better. Apple profits from those expectations, and as such ought to do what it can to maintain that allure of being above the competition, not in their class. Whether that's true at any given point or not.

Gates gets one right

2010-07-22T21:47:00.001-07:00

Quoth Hans Rosling: "child survival is the new green."

The idea is that once folks learn that their kids will make it, they quit having 6 of them just to be sure. Therefore lower population growth.

Either that or the kinds of societies that have their shit together well enough to distribute condoms and the pill reliably also happen to be capable of providing offspring with a healthy environment and medical care.

Either way, Bill Gates's fight against malaria seems well justified from a long-term perspective.

The fact that kids aren't dying of a terrible disease in the short term is probably a decent thing too. That way they can grow up to buy Windows7 phones.

As if.

Putting your best foot forward

2010-07-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Coke can on my desk contains 140 calories, all of them coming from the 39g of high-fructose corn syrup. HFCS is linked to obesity. It also contains phosphoric acid (linked to tooth problems) and caffeine (the cause of, and solution to, many of my problems).

I suppose it is with this in mind that the can proudly claims "VERY LOW SODIUM."

Way to frame it, guys.

Groucho or Karl?

2010-07-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

This is a fun video and you should watch it.

Now, somewhere in the middle he has a theory where there's no bakery, and then someone starts a bakery and then someone finances the expansion of the bakery and then there's a big bakery and everyone gets bread, but that's terrible because the guys who financed the bakery got rich, and I'm like, "well, yeah, but everyone gets bread," but he's all like "but wages are all like stagnant and shit," and I'm like "well, I lost my job in the downturn and then took another one for less money and I live in a smaller place with roommates now but I'm still able to eat bread and I can buy manufactured goods like iPads and shit that two years ago couldn't be purchased by me at my previous nominal income nor by anyone else at any income whatsoever and that's like progress and stuff and the CPI misses out on that because it thinks that a car is a car even if it's safer and more efficient and a burrito is a burrito even if Chipotle tastes better than Taco Bell and a doctor is a doctor even though this one can perform surgery on a tumor with fuckin' lasers and shit and a 'consumer electronic device' is a 'consumer electronic device' even if it's the fucking computer that fucking Picard had on the fucking Enterprise and it's got the fucking internet so I can see a video of my family 3000 fucking miles away or locate my lost ass down to 10 fucking yards anywhere on the fucking planet or hold more information than the fucking library of fucking Alexandria all in the palm of my bourgeois yuppy hands and that's progress too," and he's all like "but people lost their houses," and I'm all like "yeah, but you were just complaining about how too many of us owned houses anyway, and it's greedy to buy a house that you can't afford and you're anti-greed, aren't you," and he's all like "well, yeah, but I'm an academic and you're just a dilettante," and I'm all like "well Mr. Marxist, what are you doing here when you could be in like Venezuela or something," and he's all like "that's a cheap shot and besides I draw way better than you," and I'm like "well, you've got me there but then Iwaslikeweeeee.

And then it dawned on me: how much should the entertainment value of free YouTube videos be factored into the real dollar value of my present consumption relative to the consumption rate attainable by a comparably employed web developer in 1970, you know, before there were any internets for me to develop and then I wondered how a professor like him would send his cool video to the masses without YouTube either and then I wondered how there'd be a YouTube if they hadn't been bought by Google and how there'd be a Google if they hadn't taken venture capital and how there would be venture capital if not for capitalism but then I realized that going to bed right now would be a capital idea.

I Don't Want to be Friends

2010-07-12T16:51:00.000-07:00

(links are NSFW, but so is this entire blog).

So, they say that there are no atheists in foxholes.

The atheists say that this is an argument against foxholes.

Then, there's the argument that sex is violence.

Lady GaGa says that this is an argument in favor of violence.

To be fair, hers is not an original argument. If I'm not mistaken though, it is the first time that the argument has been made with such props as yellow bespangled 12" platform shoes.

So there's something to be said for that.

Like most things that attain popularity in our culture, this song and its video have a veneer of nonsense and banality while at the same time stemming from a reality that we all know but don't often acknowledge at a conscious level.

Tomorrow, a look at what Hanson has to say about the similarities between social networking and botany.

Never get involved in a trade war in Asia and never go in against a CEO when money is on the line

2010-07-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

So this guy thinks that we should tax offshore labor. Because "we" aren't getting the experience that we need to... build stuff or something. Trade war brinkmanship? No problem, "we" can "treat it like other wars - fight to win."

Let's just say this about that:

The wars on Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afganistan, Drugs and Terror are more than sufficient evidence that "we" don't fight to win. We start fights because we think we can do things that we can't. Then we keep fighting because we're too wussy to admit that we were wrong.
War is zero sum. Trade is not. Trading trade for war, even for a "trade" war and not a "war" war, is a bad trade.
"We" is the United States, which means that the rest of the argument only makes sense if one buys in to the social fiction of the US actually being a thing. If "we" were "mankind," the argument is silly, isn't it? "We need to stop sending jobs to ourselves, because we're losing the experience that we'll need to compete with ourselves in order to avoid locking ourselves out of our future successes." It's like isometric exercise or something.
You tax something because you want less of it. How is it not incredibly immoral to want less offshore labor? Does offshore-ness make someone undeserving of a job? When there's a drought, "we" in the US don't go hungry much less starve. Many in this world can't say that, and until they can, "they" deserve the labor before "we" do.

"We" need to quit whining and start thinking about how cool it is that our economy is the greatest value creation engine ever to exist on the planet. That's a pretty cool thing to have. All we have to do is avoid fucking things up by wasting our engine's product on phony wars, paranoid taxes and other petty bullshit. Then maybe we can use what we've made to make the world a better place for all its inhabitants. Not just the ones lucky enough to have been born within some imaginary lines on a fucking map.

In other news, it's apparently 4th of July weekend. I'm going to spend mine watching the Germans and the Argentinians play a game invented in England on a field in Africa. I'll probably be watching on a device designed by Apple in Cupertino, with an Israeli CPU that was put into it by a worker in China. If there's time, maybe I'll thank the French for helping us win that battle in Yorktown that one time and being right about that Iraq thing that other time.

Man, globalization has really made life terrible.

Oh, Flash...

2010-06-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Adobe,

It totally sucks that Steve Jobs called you out in his public letter, especially after all you and Apple have been through together as companies.

Still, I'm running the most recent MacBook Pro produced by Apple, watching the World Cup. My little activity monitor shows both processors pegged.

Seriously, it must be terrible for you that the ads and games built for your platform aren't a part of the iPad experience.

Is that the world's tiniest violin that I hear or is it just my processor fans?

Concentrating on a Concentration Camp

2010-06-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

So... what do 9/11, the nuking of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and the once or current blockades of, e.g., Gaza, Iraq, Cuba and North Korea have in common?

They're all forms of collective punishment. In some cases, the collective punishment has weak defense as the leaders whose actions are punished were elected by the populace that was punished. 9/11 and Gaza fit that mold. I naturally reject that defense, but I do note that there's a difference. The Japanese didn't exactly elect their emperor.

That said, if you're like many Americans, you probably have a very different moral judgment for 9/11 vs Nagasaki. Why?

Because the Japanese started it? The Japanese in Hiroshima share a language and an ethnicity with the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor, but that's about it. Those civilians didn't start a damned thing. How is a Japanese fisherman in Nagasaki more responsible for the actions of his country's navy than a stock broker in the World Trade is responsible for the behavior of the American military in the Middle East?

It's about time for us to grow up and quit it with this collective punishment bullshit. No amount of rockets from Gaza justify turning it into a concentration camp. Concentration camps are always and everywhere wrong. The fact that some of the Gaza residents voted for Hamas doesn't change the moral calculus at all. This will not end well.

Helping Others

2010-06-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen asks a mostly stupid question and gets mostly stupid answers: What career helps other people the most?

I feel that many people ask this question and settle on a field with linear benefit. I hesitate to make such a sweeping generalization... but in my experience, women have been more likely to take such questions seriously, and more likely to end come up with the wrong (aka "linear") answer.

By "linear" here, I mean a job where productivity is nearly linearly associated with effort. A nurse can handle X patients per hour, after that you need another nurse. Basically, if the job can fit the starfish parable, it's linear. If the job is more like "guy who designed the circuit board that improved the efficiency of the starfish saving machine by 40%," it's not linear.

Possibly the best non-linear suggestion among the comments at MR was "CEO who sends jobs to developing countries." Such CEOs construct physical infrastructure in developing countries. They pressure local governments into good long-term policies like avoiding inflation, respecting private property, maintaining order and the like. Most of all, they contribute to the development of human capital in the developing nation.

It's worth noting that this applies mostly to manufacturing and design jobs such as those done in India and China rather than resource extraction jobs such as those done in Africa. See resource curses.

It's also worth noting that India and, yes, China, have governments that permit this sort of investment, whereas many South American and African nations do not. The differences in outcomes for those countries suggest that politicians also have a tremendous multiplying effect. Consider Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

No fortune 500 CEO is in the 90th percentile for businessmen, and no president or cabinet minister is in the 90th percentile for politicians. Still, even at a lower level of success, the amount of good that one could do vastly dwarfs any of the linear responses from the article.

For those who don't dig business or law, it's probably best to find any sort of work that will increase the efficiency of those who gallantly take on the linear jobs, one starfish at a time.

Failing that... quit asking stupid questions, get the highest-paying job you can find, live on as little as you can afford, and donate the rest to the starfish-saver of your choice.

Failing that, admit to yourself that "maximizing the help you do for others" isn't the most important guiding principle for you. =)

As a side note, I'd love to sit down for a chat with the fellow who suggested "US Marine."

The Cobbler's Children

2010-05-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Spotted on the interwebs:

I solve computer problems professionally, I've no patience to deal with that kind of thing as a hobby.

This would of course be the reason why I use a Mac instead of Linux.

The Time-Value of Truth

2010-05-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

Spotted on the interwebs:

Teacher: "We'll be using History of the Modern World, Third Edition. You can verify this by viewing page 212. If it states that Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania, then you have the Third Edition. Anything else is wrong and you should click "Update E-Book" at your earliest convenience."

Orwell references are dime a dozen, but this one was particularly astute.

On current events

2010-05-23T16:40:00.001-07:00

Quoth Conan:

Pac-Man’s 30th birthday was marred by the sudden deportation of the Super Mario Bros. What were those fools doing in Arizona?

http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/statuses/14513203785

Prisoners of our own device

2010-05-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

Xkcd offers some perspective on platforms.

Good to keep in mind next time we discuss H.264 vs Ogg, MS vs... anything, or whathaveyou.

We don't need no stinkin' flash!

2010-05-21T12:54:00.000-07:00

You can play Pacman on google right now. Yeah, it works on the iPad.

Anything you can do I can do better

2010-05-20T22:22:00.000-07:00

Apple's been pretty evil lately, going after the dude who lost his prototype iPhone, picking fights with Adobe, sticking with AT&T despite overwhelming evidence that AT&T sucks.

Now say what you want about Microsoft. They'll let Google win search and Apple win mobile, tablet, and MP3 players. But they will not be out-eviled.

So, I guess that means it's time to patent-troll SalesForce. This news popped up in my feeder from about 80 different places, but 37signals gets the nod here because they're a company with the guts to put this text in an official communication on their website:

Fucking patent trolls. Fucking Microsoft. What a sad day.

No matter what company it is that signs your checks right now, chances are they aren't that ballsy.

Now, I can't think that I've ever met a developer who would rather work for a patent troll than a ballsy outfit like 37signals. Good devs make good tech, which makes this a bad move for MS. Maybe they have a hole card.

Toys

2010-05-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

Quoth Paul Graham, HT Giles:

Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

I wonder if he bought Apple on news of the iPad. My iPad is a pretty fun toy, I think.

Costs of doing business

2010-05-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

Tech companies spent 111 million on lobbying last year, with MSFT naturally leading the pack.

Some of the money was probably to encourage government adoption of their services. The rest was probably regulation repellant. Does anyone have a model for this sort of thing that explains 111 million in terms that aren't largely dead-weight loss?

Corporations have countervailing forces pushing them to be bigger (economies of scale) and pushing them to be smaller (see my too big not to fail). Lobbying costs push companies to be larger than they'd otherwise have to be.

Contrary to the common leftward model of government regulating megacorps, government regulation benefits the megacorps by increasing the amount of money and pull that is required to operate in our marketplace. The reason why Microsoft can afford a few million in bribery is that it's potential competitors cannot.

In the meantime, let's punish Goldman Sachs by introducing new compliance guidelines the adoption of which will only be affordable if you're... Goldman Sachs. We'll have mostly current and former GS management take care of writing the regs. Can't fail.

SC2B Bleg

2010-05-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

Hey, so I was kinda ignoring StarCraft 2 Beta since they didn't have a Mac client yet... but now they do.

So, anybody know anybody who's got a key? If you give me one, I'll name my first Zergling after you.

Tell-tale signs

2010-05-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

So how do you know if you're reading a publication that came from print and is now trying the interwebs? The editors make everyone capitalize "Web."

Other news at that link: It looks like the Feds are going to form a committee to see who's in charge of determining whether or not Apple's no-code-generator policy is "anti-competitive." Whatever that means.

So the editors still think that the dictionary-makes-right rules of yesteryear apply to neologisms describing the very medium that they are attempting to conquer without understanding.

Meanwhile, the regulators still think that the monopoly laws of yesteryear apply to the world of licensed SDKs and development platforms. A world which, if the Microsoft proceedings of last decade are any indication, the feds have yet to conquer or understand.

If your faith lies in Oxford's Unabridged, or Sherman's anti-trust, you are a modern day Horatio. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Why should I change? Adobe's the one that sucks.

2010-04-29T16:26:00.001-07:00

Jobs on flash in iDevices.

Can't think that he's saying anything in there that I disagree with. Maybe it's the fan boy in me, but I respect that he has the balls to call out a company as big as Adobe.

Glee

2010-04-13T23:18:00.000-07:00

So I always thought it'd be a good idea to combine the overbearing melodrama of a soap opera with the overbearing cutesie-ness of a musical.. but only on condition that the plot and setting were well-tread and vapid enough for mass prime-time appeal.

Looks like Fox beat me to it.

All that said, it was pretty good. I'd watch it again if I walk into a room and it's on. Wasn't surprised by the number of tampon ads though.

And So It Begins

2010-04-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

So there I am at work, using Firefox on the MBP to track down a technical issue. I'm reading some blog with a crappy fixed-width Wordpress theme. The kind that spits in the face of your 24" monitor with large swaths of "blog rolls," and even larger swaths of unused gray, just cuz.

"Naturally," my first instinct was to double tap the only div on the page that contained actual content that I cared about. Aardvark to the rescue, I guess, like a glass of flat Bud Light when you ordered a micro IPA.

At least I have flash.

Steer Markets, or Set Them Free?

2010-04-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

Pretty good summary. My favorite part is when she recognizes Keynes immediately but hasn't ever heard of Hayek.

Users vs Developers

2010-04-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Seen on the internets:

Apple's model will always compromise developer flexibility when user experience is at stake. Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake. People will choose based on what is important to them.

Fighting the distortion field

2010-04-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

Penny Arcade, circa a few months ago, as on-point as ever.

A better review than mine

2010-04-09T00:02:00.001-07:00

Everything you might want to know: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/the_ipad

First impressions...

2010-04-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I got it. Yes, I'm using it to write this review.

The keyboard is alright. My biggest gripe about that is the lack of dvorak, which is apparently coming.

Lack of multi-tasking is not much of an issue so far, though I am enjoying the push notification of my IM client and will probably enjoy the further developments when they come out with OS4

Full keyboard > touch > tiny keyboard > mouse. Thus I prefer the virtual setup to the scrunched confines of a net book.

I'm using it more than makes sense due to novelty, but it'll be pretty useful anyway. It delivers on the promise of the couch laptop. Good on the couch, in bed, in a car, on the john. I'm not a regular flyer, but it'd be perfect for that too. None of the heat of the MBP, and it fits where that won't.

Fit and finish are good for first gen. No major issues there.

Battery is far better than my phone. Charges slower though.

No flash is a bummer for soccer highlights, but it's really a feature not a bug. I'm okay suffering for a bit in order to push the Internet away from Adobe's grasp. HTML 5 ftw. If YouTube didn't already support it, I'd be more bummed.

As I suggested earlier, the platform is open if you're a web dev, as I am. I've already made modifications to some of my apps. I might end writing a native app for work at some point... Time will tell.

In the end, the thing I'd just plain cool. It's worth a few days' pay. If you'd need to work longer than that to afford it, spend your time investing in your human capital, not playing with new gadgets... =)

Things that would make this better: tethering off the 3GS. Dvorak keyboard. iTunes UEFA and EPL season passes. More iBooks (Or at least the few obscure ones I want). Don't care much about camera or multi tasking. More HD app ports...

Collateral what?

2010-04-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

Someboday wanna debunk this for me?

The video is here.

Wikipedia is here, and seems to be pretty straight-forward.

Anyway, this sort of thing is pretty easy. You just don't lead 'em as much.

From the department of WHAA?!?!shington

2010-04-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Philly trades McNabb to the Redskins?

Giles has a lot to say...

2010-04-05T10:36:00.001-07:00

...and for once, I agree with most of it.

Stormtroopers 365

2010-04-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

You're welcome.

Use the targetting computer... that's what it's there for

2010-04-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

Allow me to begin with an anecdote.

I own a fancy blender. The kind with demo videos on Youtube. The kind whose commercial line can be found in your local smoothie shop. The kind with a warranty. Like Walter's dog in Big Lebowski, this blender has fucking papers, Dude.

So the blender breaks. The digital readout (yes, it has one) suggests that the motor is "overloaded." My wife reports that she wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary at the time. We try the easy stuff. Turn it on and off. Unplug it and plug it in at another outlet. No love.

After some sad and smoothie-less days, we obtain permission from our housemate to use his blender while I go through the process of finding my paperwork and putting a request in to support. We get by on his (inferior) machine for a few weeks.

A few weeks later, I call support, running a few simple diagnostics, and the nice lady decides that I should ship my unit in for repair or replacement. I recount the discussion for my wife and I pick up the base unit during that discussion.

It rattles. The sort of rattle you get when loose metal bangs upon loose metal. We investigate. A screwdriver removes the bottom of the unit, revealing to us four easily understood parts: a threaded mounting, a fan, a washer, and a nut. This isn't rocket science. The fan goes on the mounting, and is secured by the washer and nut. After a few weeks out of commission, our blender is returned to service following less than 5 minutes of diagnosis and repair.

The Problem of the Broken Blender wasn't a technical issue. My wife and I were both technically capable of resolving the matter in minutes. The issue was one of attention. Neither of us had taken it upon ourselves to go beyond the level of cycling power to the next logical step: examining the unit.

Now for some folks, examination wouldn't have been enough. If one had never seen a nut or heard of a screw driver, the cues we used wouldn't work. For most of us though, the thing that keeps the problems in our lives around isn't a scarcity of ability or aptitude. It's a scarcity of attention or agency.

One way to think of the relationship between ability and agency is that the multiply. Say that fixing the blender required a technical capability of 2 out of 10, where 1 is "never seen a man-made device" and 10 is "building a working C3PO in your basement." My wife and I are probably up in the 3-5 range technically, but our lack of attention to the problem was making the applied "problem solving force" nearly zero (not exactly zero - we did at least make sure that the thing was plugged in).

A metaphor that I'm beginning to prefer is a vector. Ability is the scale of the vector, but attention is the direction. When your vector is pointed at a problem, the likelihood of the problem being resolved increases. The probability of solving the problem and the relative speed with which the problem is solved depends on ability. If you're really capable, paying any attention at all to a problem is likely to solve it. Your vector is big enough. You might solve it faster. Your vector doesn't need to be pointed in that direction as long. You might even have enough ability that you can guess the issue without thorough examination. Your vector might not even have to be pointed in exactly the right direction - even a small component might be enough.

If you don't like the vector model, consider the pinball model.

A recurring pattern in my life is the degree to which folks (myself included) continue to by stymied by problems that they have the ability to solve. I "tried" to lose weight for years with little success. Then I sat down, read some books, focused on selecting a possible solution, implemented my selection, and lost 30 pounds. Then I ran a half marathon. Then I ran a marathon. Agency is a powerful drug. I went from "trying" to trying. There's a difference.

As a developer, I see the affects of inattention all the time. It's a well known fact that users read almost nothing that is presented to them when using software. They don't read error messages. They don't check the preferences. Even when you watch a user getting visibly frustrated at the inability to do something that they want to do, they won't resort to actually looking around the menus for a solution. They won't pick up the unit and find the rattle.

We might implicate multi-tasking or over-booking, but I think this problem is more fundamental than that. Problem solving, when approached as a serious pursuit, depends upon a leap of faith on the part of the problem solver. Namely, if

I quit flailing about in an unfocused manner,
I calm down,
I think for a second about what, exactly, I'm trying to accomplish, and
I focus on accomplishing that thing,
I will have the ability to find and execute a solution.

Most of the problems confronting most of us are because we haven't gotten to (1) yet. We're just randomly flailing.

Reboot the unit then call support. Buy a few low-cal snacks at the store and hope that will cause weight loss. Click on a bunch of things for a bit without focused search or actually reading dialog boxes and hope that we'll stumble upon a solution. A prominent UI researcher wrote a book called "Don't Make Me Think." It's like that.

It's pretty easy to spot this behavior in others. I think it's much harder to spot it in ourselves.

Edjumacation

2010-04-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

Overheard on the internets:

Cultures and subcultures which do not place value on education all have serious problems now, regardless of whether they are 'native' or 'recently immigrant' - Marian Kechlibar on Marginal Revolution

iPad, do you?

2010-04-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

Dear internets,

I am a web developer. As far as I'm concerned, the iPad IS an open platform. Also, lack of flash is a feature, not a bug. If IE didn't support flash starting next week, it wouldn't take long for the internet to become a better place.

That said, multi-tasking would be nice.

Simpler Times

2010-03-30T01:56:00.001-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Even Better Than the Real Thing

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Reform

Speaking of Brave New Worlds

2010-03-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

Huxley vs Orwell: cartoon version. Pass the soma please.

Call him the Knave, if you're into the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing.

2010-03-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

Shakespearean Lebowski. O brave new world that hath such mash-ups in it.

Zomg

2010-03-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Page, Edge and Jack White. It might get loud.

For your next party

2010-03-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

Consider c-jump. Then consider something else.

If you do play, here's a pro-tip: don't play with Rubyists or Lispers because they cheat. Worse, when you call them on it, they call it "meta-programming" and pretend like it's not a problem.

Now for something everyone can enjoy

2010-03-28T13:27:00.001-07:00

Breakdancing fingers.

Blogs you should be reading

2010-03-27T23:25:00.000-07:00

Since I'm on a posting spree anyway, here's ye old blog roll. Opinions linked herein aren't necessarily endorsed. The necessary qualifications are that the material be interesting, original, thought-provoking and/or well-written.

General

Programming

I read about 70 more, but these are the best. Anything I should add?

Quality over quantity

2010-03-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

Dear internet, life expectancy is not by itself a sufficient metric for the performance of a health care system.

It's a nice proxy for "are people dying of preventable crap that most Americans associate with the Civil War era," but we can and should expect more.

Which means we need better metrics. Ideas?

Role Reversal

2010-03-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

One of the smarter things that I've read in a while:

I had a fantasy in which the Fed and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) switched roles.
If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning and shut its doors, the TSA would announce that all banks henceforth begin their business day at 10 a.m.
And, if a terrorist managed to get on board a plane between Stockholm and Washington, the Fed would increase the number of flights between the cities.

Speaking of Avatar...

2010-03-27T20:04:00.001-07:00

“Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script.”

Resource Curse

2010-03-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

So a while back, I posted this. I titled the post "connecting the dots" and connected them to a Slashdot post about feminism and agency. What I should have done was connect a bit further to that nagging feeling I get whenever I experience how run down the native areas of Hawaii are.

The problem with living in paradise or having bribe-worthy boobs is the same: resource curse.

Heck, this was my problem with Avatar as well. The blue people weren't striving to build capital or learn more than their parents. Their parents had come up with a functioning system and they were trying to conserve it, not build upon it. Maintain a cultural and technological velocity of zero.

When you've got a culture living in harmony with it's environment and simply iterating the generations without significant development or expansion, you've got the ideal environment for a story. Dances with Wolves, Avatar, Fiddler on the Roof, Tolkien's Shire.

What you also have is a recipe for getting flat out owned by the folks who aren't in harmony. Dances with Wolves got it right and Avatar got it wrong. Brother Iz and the Hawaiian independence folks need to heed the advice from Marlo in The Wire: "you want it to be one way. But it's the other way."

In real life, the best case for the blue people would be leading tourist expeditions to the minor cultural sites that remained after the marines wiped out home tree and the surrounding environs. Perhaps they might find decent pay working in resorts in the floating mountains.

It's easy to subscribe to the romantic vibe of knowing when you have enough, living in harmony, and simply coasting on the bounty that the universe has provided. But the girl getting her papers written for boob pics is going to be another data point in the salary deficit between men and women. The Hawaiian fantasizing about living off the land and the sea is going to be as screwed as the South East Asians were when the tsunami hit. His great grandparents were as screwed as the Cherokee when the US decided that we wanted Hawaii to be ours instead of theirs.

If we're ever going to get off of oil, cure cancer (or mortality itself), or fight off the next meteor/ice age/whatever, we're going to need to strive, not stand still.

The winning answer is education, creation, organization, engineering. Cultures and individuals that don't value those things will fall at the hands of cultures that do, to natural disasters, or changing environments. When a living can be had without those values, the stage is set for trouble.

Yes this is a Randian notion. What do you want to do? Fight about it? We might want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

If it weren't for the internet,

2010-03-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

we would never have known about this.

Timely Tardiness

2010-03-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

So I just watched Avatar* a few weeks back, a bit behind the curve I know.

Then today I'm going through my RSS reader and I start seeing Avatar review posts. I'm about 3.5 months behind on RSS as well, so it all worked out. Time machine FTW.

*Slipshod assortment of various noble savage themes with a host of super-cliché moments barely excused by kick-ass visuals. Would have been immeasurably better if it had ended as a tragedy rather than continuing on for the inevitable final battle. Cameron tried to be Spielberg because he lacked the guts to be a Kubrick. The result reminded me of the recent efforts of Lucas, and that's not a compliment.

Connecting the Dots

2010-03-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

So... a while back I ran into this. Then today I ran into this. All of it's quite interesting, though we have to remember that the plural of anecdote is... bullshit.