One of the most frustrating things about being an untenured anthropology professor (aside from being untenured) is that, for the most part, the articles you must write to get tenure strike those you write about as hopelessly boring and jargony. I always imagine that when geeks read my articles, the experience can be represented as follows:

%*&%*&*(((& Linux *(&*(^%&%%^%% DeCSS &*(&^&&*^&^&^& Free Speech %^&%^%^%%^ Hacking &*(&^*(^^*^**^*Code*((*&&**&&*&* Emacs **(**)*( New Maintainer Process *&())))))))))&*&7&&*&)*&*&*&& DMCA **(**((( Copyleft. ****W$$&& TINC

Well, finally, I have my hands on the uncorrected proofs of an article that is far far more readable, accessible, and truth be told, romantic than anything I have written The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld. This article s ancestry goes back to this ancient blog entry that I wrote after Debconf4 in Brazil, later made it into my dissertation, and finally a gabillion years later is on the verge of publication. Debian developers, in particular, might dig this piece. I made use of your blog entries, mailing list discussions, interviews, and photos to reveal what is special about these events and also memorialize some important events, such as the the founding of Debian Women. So while some I am sure some academics will find this piece distasteful for idealizing these events, so be it. I grew very fond of these conferences, they changed the way I thought of computer hacking, and why not write something that makes those you worked with feel good (as opposed to bored and confused). Finally, academics have totally missed the theoretical boat when it comes to conferences, which are probably one of the most important ritual forms of modernity and yet there is so little written on them an issue I address briefly in the conclusion. Note that this version has various mistakes (including the name of Joel Espy Klecker and the caption under Figure 3, and Figure 9). Since many of your are human debugging machines, if anyone takes a preview read and finds any typos, feel free to send along as I will be sending the proofs back next week.

One of the most frustrating things about being an untenured anthropology professor (aside from being untenured) is that, for the most part, the articles you must write to get tenure strike those you write about as hopelessly boring and jargony. I always imagine that when geeks read my articles, the experience can be represented as follows:

%*&%*&*(((& Linux *(&*(^%&%%^%% DeCSS &*(&^&&*^&^&^& Free Speech %^&%^%^%%^ Hacking &*(&^*(^^*^**^*Code*((*&&**&&*&* Emacs **(**)*( New Maintainer Process *&())))))))))&*&7&&*&)*&*&*&& DMCA **(**((( Copyleft. ****W$$&& TINC

Well, finally, I have my hands on the uncorrected proofs of an article that is far far more readable, accessible, and truth be told, romantic than anything I have written The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld. This article s ancestry goes back to this ancient blog entry that I wrote after Debconf4 in Brazil, later made it into my dissertation, and finally a gabillion years later is on the verge of publication. Debian developers, in particular, might dig this piece. I made use of your blog entries, mailing list discussions, interviews, and photos to reveal what is special about these events and also memorialize some important events, such as the the founding of Debian Women. So while some I am sure some academics will find this piece distasteful for idealizing these events, so be it. I grew very fond of these conferences, they changed the way I thought of computer hacking, and why not write something that makes those you worked with feel good (as opposed to bored and confused). Finally, academics have totally missed the theoretical boat when it comes to conferences, which are probably one of the most important ritual forms of modernity and yet there is so little written on them an issue I address briefly in the conclusion. Note that this version has various mistakes (including the name of Joel Espy Klecker and the caption under Figure 3, and Figure 9). Since many of your are human debugging machines, if anyone takes a preview read and finds any typos, feel free to send along as I will be sending the proofs back next week.

I was referred to Creating a World Without Poverty during a discussion on advogato some months ago, but it took rather a long time to obtain the book for various reasons and then I forgot about this review until a recent discussion on new Cooperatives-UK Chief Ed Mayo s site. Better late than never, here s my review of it. Let me know what you think of this book. About the Book Author Muhammad Yunus is founder of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, one of the microcredit pioneers, but that story has been told in another book Banker to the Poor. The prologue of this book starts with the creation of Grameen Danone a joint venture between the bank and the France-based Groupe Danone then part one describes problems in capitalism and introduces the idea of Social Businesses as a complement to what the book calls Profit-Maximising Businesses (PMBs), or what most people know as usual shareholder companies. Part two then covers the Grameen Group from its start in banking, through an impressive list of short company case studies some Social, some PMBs, some joint-ventures up to the first year or so of Grameen Danone. The final part then talks about creating a marketplace which is open to Social Businesses, harnessing Information Technology to spread these ideas (more on this in a later article on this site) and using those innovations to banish poverty from the world. The epilogue is the Nobel Prize Lecture Poverty Is a Threat to Peace which seemed to read almost as a simplified summary of the book s main ideas. Annoyance I got quite annoyed with this book because I feel there is a lurking absurdity in its main big idea:- On the one hand, the argument seems to be that profit-maximising businesses are problematic because of their single-minded focus on profit-maximisation. This is an argument that I largely agree with, as you may remember from my short review of Joel Bakan: The Corporation. On the other hand, it proposes to remedy this by creating Social Businesses with equally single-minded focus on social problems this seems like a recipe for disaster! If profit-maximisers threaten to wreck the environment, human rights or whatever else isn t in their goals, why won t Social Businesses using similar single-purpose company formation rules just as easily threaten to wreck whatever mentioned isn t in their goals? If this book is correct and entrepreneurs are multi-faceted human beings who will act to promote social aims (which they must if they are to invest in Social Businesses), then the only robust way forward is to promote businesses that do not try to simplify that multi-faceted nature, whether for profit-maximisation or for a subset of social aims. The best form of businesses that I know for trying to represent all interests of their owners are cooperatives. Dismissed after less than a page Cooperatives are examined in part one of the book and dismissed after less than a page (p35) because they are not inherently oriented towards helping the poor or producing any other specific social benefit (which is a misleading claim because concern for community is a basic principle of cooperatives which all should uphold), they can be owned equally by the wealthy as well as the needy (why is this a problem?) and they can sometimes be demutualised into PMBs. Ultimately, if that s the will of the people, that can t be completely prevented, but recent developments have found ways to make that much less attractive (so-called anti-carpetbagging rules). Doing what people want is not usually a problem in other spheres it s democracy. What s really infuriating is that the author proceeds to describe Social Business which are aimed at specific social benefits (rather than all), can only be owned by the needy but can access the resources they need by donations from the wealthy or by forming joint ventures with them (even very unequal ones) and can be desocialised into profit-maximisers (p178). The same problems which were used to reject cooperatives exist just as badly, if not worse! Conclusion: a bit disappointing So, ultimately, I found this book a bit disappointing. There are lots of good ideas, but when presented with a ready-made round wheel for the basic problem of tempering profit maximisation, this book reinvents an oval one. I suppose I shouldn t be surprised. The misleading criticism of cooperatives is sadly typical of much of the current social enterprise movement, which I mentioned as a drawback in the recent case study of our co-op by Cooperatives-UK. I don t know if social enterprise enthusiasts are informed by the thinking of people like Muhammad Yunus, or if the high-profile authors simply reflect the movement. Have you read this book? Did you spot this contradiction? Do you feel it has other problems that I m ignoring? Or is it a work of genius and I shouldn t be disappointed with it?

Today I attended RubyCamp (schedule available), organized by my friends at Instituto de F sica, at my University. I presented three plugins I made and regularly use. The organizers followed a short, more informal scheme than most conferences I am used to Talk slots range between 5 and 15 minutes, so we attended a whole day of semi-lightning talks. Of course, many people have run late, and although there was quite a bit of free space in the schedule, it has been practically non-stop I was thinking on also giving a talk on encodings (as many people really still don't understand what is UTF-8, what is Latin1, why all that mess People, please learn at least The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)), but the schedule is full by now. Interesting and successful experiment, I'd say. The talks are being taped, and the organizers say they will be soon made available online. There are many cultural details to note here. First of all, yes, the Rails Fanboys _are_ a cult/sect. I think we have ~90% of MacBooks... I still fail to understand why a coder feels at ease on MacOS. I deeply despise it! Also, most of this community have bitten the Twitter plague. This is also a community very much into businessspeak, speaking a word in English for each two words in Spanish (I try to be consistent, not mixing languages at least). Some conferences have been quite business- and enterpeneur-oriented. Although I should not complain too much about this, as it is an important aspect for many people But I still don't feel at ease having talks on how to run a business if we were asked for presentations on technical aspects! Anyway - I was quite happy to be here. This is the first real technical, code-oriented conference I have attended in a long time in Mexico. And we need more like this! We have too many entry-level, evangelization-oriented conferences, but very few like this one. [update]: Group photo!

Bruce Schneier has written about the foolish actions of Justice Antonin Scalia [1]. Antonin made some comments opposing the need for greater privacy protection, most people could get away with doing that, but when a Supreme Court Justice does so it gets some attention. In response to this Fordham University law professor Joel Reidenberg assigned his class a project to discover private information on Antonin using public sources. The class produced a dossier of such information which was then offered to Antonin [2], but which was not published. Now anyone who knows anything about how the world works would just accept this. Among other things Antonin now knows what is publicly available and can take steps to remove some public data according to his own desires. But being apparently unaware of the Streisand effect [3] Antonin went on to say the following: It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any. This is of course essentially issuing a challenge to the entire Internet to discover the information that the Fordham students discovered. Of course doing so would not be fun unless it was published. The meme of 2009 has yet to be defined, it might be discovering and widely publishing personal information about Antonin. Already one of the comments in Bruce Schneier s blog suggests that activists should do such research on all senior figures in the US government to encourage them to take privacy more seriously. I expect that the first reaction of the legislative branch to such practices would be to enact special laws to protect their own privacy while still allowing large corporations (the organisations that pay for the election campaigns) to do whatever they want to ordinary people. It s an interesting situation, I predict that Antonin will regard this as one of the biggest mistakes he s ever made. I m sure that there are many more LULZ to come from this.

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/googling_justic.html


• [2] http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/04/justice_scalias_2.html

<:LI>[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Via blaxter, I got to know autojump. It hooks into your shell, tracking the directories you visit, and provides a j command that allows you to cd to a directory by providing a string or regular expression that matches the directory you want to visit. To decide among various possibilities, the code has gotten to know the frequency with which you ve visited each directory, and how long you stayed on it (or, rather, how many commands you execute in it, it seems). I ve been using it for a week now, and it indeed improves The Shell Experience . By the way, if you d rather not execute a Python script with every prompt (!), there seems to be a small sister project/clone written in shell and awk here.

Although it still nominally has my name on it, the Debian dovecot package has for a long time been looked after by Fabio Tranchitella. Recently, Joel Johnson has joined the team and he has prepared a package for version 1.1.1 which was uploaded to experimental a couple of days ago. Upstream thinks 1.1.1 will probably not be stable enough for Lenny but a backport will be provided (perhaps even by me!) Testing/Unstable will stick with the 1.0 series until after the release.

Okay, following my irritated post I received (sigh) complaints about me being too harsh. So to these people here is what I say, because I'm tired answering the same thing over and over. For starters, the SSL dialog in firefox is badly designed:

1. My mom doesn't grok it, so it totally fails the "corridor testing" (see JoelOnSoftware if you don't know what it is), stop pretending otherwise;
2. since it fails with the "average not very computer literate user", I, as an advanced user, believe to be representative of this kind of person, say and affirm that this UI is completely broken and horrible, not to mention counter-intuitive.

That said, I have other things to say on the form. Yeah I've been harsh, and I will continue to be about this issue: this has not been designed with the simplicity in mind, but by geeks (FSVO geek) that believe that it's important to educate people about how nice HTTPS is and that everyone should talk in S3kr3t because its 733t. And I'm sure they tried very hard to make it very painful for users to have to deal with HTTPS and not believe in it to be trusted for bad reasons. Why ?

• because geeks want to use https when possible ;
• but they care about it to be secure (FSVO secure);
• and that they want the whole world to do like them because they know the TRUTH.

HELLLOOOO PEOPLE this is the wrong way to do it. People are already aware that it is https, because they did typed https in the URL. And again, my mom doesn't know what the s in https stands for and she doesn't care. What she cares about is to see the small lock when she logs on her bank website, not even when she goes on her webmail. You REALLY want to make a simple UI ? Well, please try to explain and justify (with real arguments) Why on earth is https with an untrusted certificate less secure than http ?. Okay I'll let you 3 seconds to think. 1
2
3 What is your answer ? OH see ? it isn't. So now second 1 question, why does it need to be more painful to use https with an untrusted certificate than plain http ?. Well, I don't have 3 seconds to give anymore, so let's jump to the answer: there is absolutely no reason. See, I'm far from an UI expert, and what I use every day for UIs would revulse 99% of the planet: vim as an editor, awesome as a tiling window manager, vimperator for a browser, and I live most of the time in a terminal. But it takes me like 10 minutes to design what I believe to be an excellent UI for https with untrusted certificate: just don't mind the certificate and show it like plain HTTP. YES I'M ANNOYED That brings me to the last point. I see in my comments, and have received the same by mail, that I should not be harsh with people writing such a brilliant piece of software. Well, the fact that firefox is or is not a good piece of software is totally irrelevant. When you claim no less than trying to reinvent the web, well, if you fuck up this big, you deserve it. No matter if it's a free piece of software or not. (or a piece of free software or not). When you request your users to click on FIVE completely counter-intuitive buttons/urls to finally be able to see a webpage they want to see (and my mom doesn't care about the webmail being insecurely hosted, really), with the first screen being almost the same than what you get when a serer timeouts or 404, well, you're just out of your mind. There is absolutely nothing that can excuse such a bad design, and the SSL thing is a failure. I mean everyone is laughing at the vista way of asking you if you really meant to go pee, well I see no difference here, it's as dumb and inefficient. No matter how much firefox did improved (and it did memory wise, believe me, I feel it, and I'm really glad about that), https is part of my everyday's life. Those five clicks are a real PAIN. When I'm reading documentation, browsing some sources, and so on, I go through this dialog about 3 to 10 times in a row. I'm totally unimpressed, and just because a couple of geeks believed that it was GOOD to educate me about how dangerous untrusted certificates are, I have to break my workflow to grab my mouse in the middle of my work. No sorry, I don't really want to be calm. In fact, what annoys me the most, is that I'm a programmer. And as a programmer, the worst thing to me, is regression. Regression is what happens when you're sloppy, and don't test your program enough. It's what happen when you aren't good enough to keep your concentration, and don't see the big picture, and constantly break your program invariants. So when I see a regression that people did on purpose, well, it shocks me beyond what I can explain with words, that's the worst thing you can do to a piece of software. I won't really mind a new feature that only partially works, I won't mind if a feature that is complicated to write isn't there after 5 years dreaming of it, but this ? I do mind. There is no way to consider that ruining a piece of software like that to the name of A Greater Good is excusable. Oh and last words: wanting to educate people this way is a way worst offense that what I will ever say on the subject. Such a condescending approach to what they think of their users reminds me of various journalists that I met, and that when I tried to rephrase some things so that they can write about it to their readers, answered to me oh you know, they're too dumb, they'll never understand. And as a result, articles or interview are always distorted, can't interest the readers that don't care about the subject a lot, because there's nothing captivating in the article, and is totally inexact and uninteresting to people interested in the matter, because it's void from its substance. Well, the SSL dialog gives me the very same impression: it's annoying to me who knows what a SSL certificate is, and my mom won't know a single bit more what an SSL certificate is and why she should care^[1].

It’s nice to be able to count on friends across vendors. The two new Parted Team members, Joel Andres Granados Moreno and Bryn Reeves from Red Hat, has been working with me to solve the s390 error that was blocking Debian to move to latest parted release (1.8.8 up to now). They’ve had a hard time to identify the real problem and we helped each other for those past two weeks. That’s awesome to be able to share the work load and be able to get help to solve problems. Even more when this is done for a very important software like Parted. I do believe this is the way to go for Free Software projects… maybe others could learn from that? Cheers

I really don't think I have anything to add to Joel Spolsky's latest essay, on the horror of architecture astronauts. My favourite quote:

It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build.

• Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky s Martian Headsets
  Haha.
• Robots are getting better...the Big Dog robot can recover itself...
  Watch the video!
• Apple iPhone bootloader attack
• APIs: "Easy to Use" vs "Hard to Misuse"

My rogue memory wasn't so rogue after all. Kyle and Joel helped find some evidence of gaming activity, and now I've found all the details in my mail archives of the trip, and also attending CSLUG, in February '97. Turns out that I do remember the other part of the trip, which was visiting Anna at Swarthmore. Nice to have electronic archives, as the meat ones fade away..

Update (3/3/2008): We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers. Here is my writeup of yesterdays Android Code Day in London. Eclipse 3.3 is needed to get the plugin working. Only eclipse 3.2 is in Debian unstable. Download the Europa release and re-setting up the plugin will do it. I’m no Eclipse fan boy, though the integrated debugger works. The iteration cycles are really short for trying stuff out. Very good. Developers, mainly from a Symbian background grilled Jason Chen over security and wanting C API access. Lot of people didn’t seem to like the idea that users were controlling security. I like Google’s “empowering the users” stance, though I think representatives from operators don’t. I heard that poor argument about users asking their operators for android support. Jason argued well that it’s up to user education to contact the right people. When a computer crashes in the UK, who do people call? VirginMedia? Please! :) How about Breakpad crash reporting on Android?. Jason used the OHA to defend Google from looking like they have all the political power… Hmmmm. :) I can understand the tight rope that Google are walking. They are trying not to fragment their platform before it’s properly released. OEMs, operators will feck it up if they have the chance to play with the source code before a Google co-ordinated release. Once they release Google claim they will release everything under the Apache 2 license. So I asked could we see Android on desktops? Jason said there is nothing stopping you. I hope not. Their opened fonts and multimedia codecs on desktop PCs could really make a big difference for Linux take up, especially in Asian (growth) markets. I have studied and implemented Asian fonts and Android’s font rendering even on that nightmare Website sina looked good to me. Despite the “Symbian developers” giving Jason hell in the beginning I had impression they actually liked Android. It fealt almost staged. Scary. Symbian C++ programmers learning Java and jumping ship! Same old problems with images. People are concerned about how bitmap images will scale on different target screens. There is four ‘skins’ already supported in the emulator (QVGA-L+P, HVGA-L+P). We need scalable images too on the Web. ;) Though there are some workarounds demonstrated which seemed OK to me. During the hackathon, I wanted to write a backup/sync tool. Since only Jason Chen seemed to know Android and there was a filled audience, I didn’t get to ask him how really to go about coding it. Though with the help of Dave from Zyb, we eventually found out about content providers. Took some debugging to find that out, but we got there. Having a working debugger is really really nice. We discovered we needed “android.permission.READ_CONTACTS” in the manifest to make our little application that read out the contact on stdout. Cool, though I’d rather use Javascript and the Web stack. Anyway, Android seemed like a good platform, but I have concerns. My biggest concern is basically where is Google Gears on Android? Jason could neither confirm or deny this, so perhaps they have it. Though gears is an opensource project and you can see code reviews… no Android mentioned. What happens if the Android platform is wildly successful? Then we are going to see two major platforms. The Android platform on mobiles and the Web platform on everything else. I worryingly saw no support for Web application device APIs on Android. Encouraging people to write for their Android/java-esque platform undermines their main Web platform! It’s like Microsoft’s mistake of undermining their own platform all over again. From Android you can use Webkit and the Web stack. But from the Web API stack you can’t seemingly access their Dalvik VM APIs. I disclose I am an employee of Aplix (opinions etc. are my own), also a OHA member. I am actively working on a plugin technology that exposes APIs as familiar JS APIs to Web developers. I have already done a proof of concept implementation of Google Gear’s Location API on mobile devices with Aplix technologies. Google you should really do the same and make Web applications equal citizens on your mobile platform by implementing Gears on Android (if you haven’t already).

Russ Nelson: The Influence of Government writes:

"Larry Lessig proposes to lessen the influence of money on legislators. Unfortunately for him, he is trying to hide a symptom without curing the disease. The disease is that governments regulate businesses. The symptom is that businesses then have a profit motive in regulating governments. If you want a government which is free of corruption, you have to eliminate the motive for corrupting them."

which looks like utter bovine excrement to me. Corporations - and the overpowering profit motive of some corporations - are artificial things, created purely by regulations. If you free corporations from all regulations, you destroy them. If you only free them from taxes, you remove some of the few restraints on their bad behaviour in pursuit of profit. See Joel Bakan: The Corporation for a better approach. In summary:-

• Relegislate. Base regulations on the precautionary principle for environmental, health and safety issues;
• Set realistic enforcement agency staffing levels and punishments;
• Involve local elected representatives in more of the regulatory system;
• Protect and enhance the role of trade unions and civil society in advising regulators.

Some of those may seem surprising, but if you read the book, you'll see why those conclusions make sense.

Recently, as part of the many antitrust/anti-competition legal actions they’re suffering under, Microsoft released specifications for the old Office binary file formats. As expected, they’re big and complex. Joel Spolsky (a former member of the Excel team) had some thoughts on their size and complexity:

With a little bit of digging, I ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn t reflect bad programming on Microsoft s part, and what you can do to work around it.

The digging turns up reasons that make some sense: the limitations of older computers, feature creep, a complete lack of attention to the future. But it’s hard to see some of these reasons as “why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part”. Carelessness is common, sure, but we don’t call it a virtue because everybody does it. And these are problems that should have been on someone’s radar at Microsoft. It’s one thing for a grunt programmer to hack a feature to meet a deadline; it’s another for the management to simply go along with it, or to not order a rethink when the problems come to light. When you read about hacks like the following, everything sounds nice and reasonable, until you remember what the end result is: that Microsoft Excel doesn’t have a standard format for storing and manipulating dates!

There are two kinds of Excel worksheets: those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1900 (with a leap-year bug deliberately created for 1-2-3 compatibility that is too boring to describe here), and those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1904. Excel supports both because the first version of Excel, for the Mac, just used that operating system s epoch because that was easy, but Excel for Windows had to be able to import 1-2-3 files, which used 1/1/1900 for the epoch. It s enough to bring you to tears. At no point in history did a programmer ever not do the right thing, but there you have it.

It may not have been the wrong decision, in the sense that it enabled them to ship, and shipping is everything in some circles. But as a design decision, how can anyone defend such inconsistency? Business information technology was able to move forward in the early ’90s because older document formats like 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were simple enough to import easily into Microsoft Office. Today, when we talk about moving to open-source suites like OpenOffice or online systems like Google Docs, detractors left and right cite the pain of document conversion as a reason to hold back. But if Joel is right about the old binary formats, the pain of transition is like the pain of changing your oil: you can pay now, or you can pay a lot more later. Even Microsoft is having trouble opening its own files from long ago, with “long ago” being a period measured in years, not decades. Maybe you didn’t write anything a decade ago you’d care to read again today; maybe you can’t imagine any of your stuff being worth reading a decade from now. Do you want to take that chance? Thankfully, I was a geek, and kept most of my documents in plain text. Today, I take care to save important documents in formats and encodings designed for the long haul, like Unicode, ODF, and PDF. It helps that I avoid Microsoft software like the plague. (If you think they’ve changed since the bad old days, just surf the web in Firefox on Linux sometime, and see how many badly-rendered pages look much better when you switch their text encoding from Unicode to “Windows-1252″.) If you have a lot of Office documents, even if you’re happy with Office, you might consider whether you care about opening those documents ten years from now, and whether you’d rather take the time to future-proof them while you still can.

On my way home from New Zealand, I spent a (Friday) night in Melbourne. Peter, Donna, Andrew, and Mark, all of whom I knew from LCA 2008, came out and helped me get away from the after-work-craze that filled centre city. Thanks to them, I found (and refound) a couple of places worth noting:

• The staff of Joe Taylor, a cute bar at the corner of Victoria and Errol Streets, prepare a delicious cocktail they call Don Quixote : vodka, lime, basil, sugar, and ginger beer. They also have Mountain Goat on tap; their hightail beer instantly became my new Aussie favourite.
• The Hot Poppy right next door has all-day breakfast, including a fantastic housemade Bircher M esli. Both Joel, who joined me for brunch, and I enjoyed it, so you don t have to rely on just my judgement.
• The outdoor bar my brother and I found on our previous visit to Melbourne, fenced off from a small lane with crates and boxes to sit on, is called Section Eight Container Bar. It s on Tattersals Lane, which is off Lt. Bourke Street between Swanston and Russell. It took me three tries to find it again, but it was worth it. They also serve Mountain Goat beers! Issue 5 of the Melbourne Pixel magazine has a review of it in the right pane.
• The Somerset Gordon Place hotel at 19 Lt. Bourke Street is a splendid location within walking distance from the centre. It s a four star hotel, but you can get sweet last minute deals there via booking.com, it seems.
• Federation Square and Wharf next to Flinders Station are always worth a visit.

NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Happy Ending Update: Joel points out that the Australia on Collins shopping centre on 260 Collins street has free wireless

(or: Why Everyone Should Learn Some Basic Programming) I am an organisational disaster area. I just can't remember "event oriented" information (like "I need to do $foo" or "I need to do $bar at $time"). I think I've accumulated such a huge collection of technical trivia that it's taken over the event planning part of my brain -- although, since I've never been able to remember event oriented information, even before I became a computer geek, it's more likely that I was just built without that bit of the brain. So I guess I'm the perfect target market for some sort of external brain pack (a la "Ratbert the Consultant"). I've tried paper-based organisers (the mighty Filofax), a few pre-written apps, and I even bought an SL-C3200 Zaurus a while ago (although, to be fair, that was really just for the hack factor, regardless of what justification I may have given to others at the time). None have worked, for various reasons. I can't grep paper, and Other People's Apps bug me because they've got their idea of workflow, and I've got mine, and when they don't match up (and they never do) I just get irritated -- not to mention the fact that the ubiquitous relational database, while wonderful in some ways, does tend to get in the way of ad-hoc faffing with your data. But this article is a success story, not a rant (gasp!), so it's safe for you to assume that I've got something that's working for me. My method is real simple -- plain text files, managed by vim-outliner and a simple shell one-liner I've named 'pda', which just runs vim ~/pda/$1.otl. At the moment I've got a monster todo.otl, which is my world's todo list, and a deeply underused calendar.otl. I'm also using vim-outliner to do some project planning, which has been moderately successful, although I'm a bit freaked out by the idea of trying to manage a large-scale project using it. The really, really cool part of this whole shebang, though, is that because all of my data is (structured) plain text, writing little programs to parse the data and do funky things with it is dead simple. For example, in my project outlines, I put estimated, actual, and remaining times in for all tasks (a la Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Schedules) so I can keep track of my estimates and where they differ from reality (because one day I'd like to not Suck at estimating times, and feedback is the only way I'm going to do that). So, about an hour's worth of Ruby gave me "estimator", a script that reads all that data and does a pile of mathematical gubbins about how far over my estimate I am so far (or under estimate, if that were to ever happen), the percentage of the project complete (based on the estimates and number of tasks completed), and things like that. Similarly, today I wrote a small script (run out of cron in the wee hours of the morning) to read my calendar and send me an e-mail if I've got anything in there for today. Since I practically live in mutt, a morning e-mail is going to be far more effective than my trying to remember to check my calendar every morning (especially since, at present, I'm not using the calendar as often as I should, so there's even less motivation to check it). This, in my opinion, is why everybody (literally, every single person) should learn to program at some fairly simple level, like learning to read and write. By using plain text and small scripts, I've got a workflow that works for me, and it's cost me less time than I'd spend learning some large pre-written app and putting all my data into it. Being able to manipulate data like this is, I think, a fairly important tool in the modern world, and I don't think it should be left to any sort of priesthood of developers -- it should be as universal as most countries try to make literacy and numeracy.

I have been living at home for the past few weeks, and as such have been reading the paper after breakfast. I can do this in Durham too, its just a bit more of a fight to get the paper. After a couple of weeks, I commented to my mother than the columnists seemed to be a bit dire. She pointed out that they all started well, and steadily when't downhill. One would assume that they just ran out of interesting things to say. I was looking at the Daily WTF today, now renamed to Worse than Failure, and I was reminded of this observation. When I found the site, I did look at the entries and go "WTF?", now I just look and go "meh". I'm guessing that its running out of spectacular material, and that each new posting pushes the boundary of what it takes to be a good posting, or in the case of the Daily WTF, a bad one. At the same time, the number of readers is getting bigger, so the numbers of comments are getting bigger, so there are more silly comments. Add in the bigger readership means more demand for material, and the site's operator starts accepting lesser quality stories and the comments go down hill. Slashdot is the worst example of this, with both dire stories and comments. OSNews has also fallen over this problem. All in all, this means that as a good blogger / news site, you have to accept the fact that you aren't going to post that often, and accept the fact that you aren't going to get lots of hits and have a steady readership. A few folk, such as Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky, seem to do this. Of course, writing without readers means writing for yourself, which is the normal advice writers offer on how to get started. So the best way to start is the best way to continue, writing about stuff that interests you and not really caring about having readers.Oh, and incase you are wondering, I don't care about folks reading my blog, and sometimes wish they didn't. They tell me I'm wrong. They get me in the coffee shop and start arguing about stuff I wrote while drunk two weeks ago. anyway... Getting back to where I started, both newpaper columnists and sites going downhill doesn't really bother me. After a while, they slip into the crap threshold and I stop reading them. Its just sad that they slip away. PS: Edwin Brady tells the Daily WTF was always quite bad. Maybe its just me who takes ages to pick up on bad sites.

I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving Brocade for a few months now. They’ve always been great to me, and I’ve enjoyed working there. But I’ve been there for nearly five years, and it was my first real job out of college, so I’ve decided I want to try something different. I especially want to get out of the storage sector; even though Brocade is really a networking company, their primary business (and everything I’ve ever worked on here) has been Fibre Channel, which is really only used for storage. I’ve been monitoring jobs.joelonsoftware.com, and in early January (just after I had gotten Lisa a new Series 3 for Christmas) I saw a listing for TiVo. So I decided to apply. After a phone screen and two on-site interviews with a variety of people, they offered me a job, and last Wednesday, I accepted. My last day at Brocade will be next Friday, March 2, and my first day at TiVo will be Thursday, March 8. It’s finally been announced at Brocade; otherwise I would have posted this sooner. It’ll be nice to work on something that I actually use again. (I’ll be working on the TiVo service for Comcast DVRs.) It’s easier for me to be self-motivated when I’m working on something that is potentially going to benefit me, outside of just the usual compensation. That’s the whole motivating factor of open source, at least in theory, right? I know it’s why I worked on gaim. Also, it’s a lot easier to explain to people. Telling people I work on a Fibre Channel Router, if they don’t know anything about storage, is just gibberish, and trying to explain it is aggravatingly time-consuming. Anyway, wish me luck.

I’m often asked why I’m so obsessed with backward compatibility and, as a result, why I’ve made the issue such a central part of the LSB over the past year. Yes, it’s hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term “just” for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don’t break. Why is backward compatibility important? Here’s a great example, via Joel Spolsky (note: from 2004):

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He’s been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons. The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: “Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, ‘Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.’ Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)” I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1… A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work… To contrast, I’ve got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

I can almost feel the revulsion among my readership right about now. However, next time you’re in Best Buy or CompUSA, look at the shelf of Windows applications, then compare it to the shelf of Mac applications, and perhaps you’ll better understand why it’s important. Beyond the results speaking for themselves, I’ll argue that it takes a better engineer to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break. It’s pretty easy to wash your hands of something and declare it to be someone else’s problem.