Writings

I was headed over to a friend's house the other night, so looking them up on google maps to make sure I knew the way. In the process I stumbled upon something that totally threw me.

This is a map of Poughkeepsie, NY, what I typically get when I bring up Google Maps.

Notice anything odd near the Golf Club? No? I didn't either, for years.

How about now? Kind of looks interesting huh?

Oh, look it's a plane in flight. Well isn't that the damnest thing. I even know that flight path, as it's the one where they turn over our neighborhood before heading in for a landing at Stewart air port. The flight is typically 4 in the afternoon IIRC.

This looks a lot like what you see with asteroids going through star fields because astro photographs are taken with a single CCD and color filters, which provide much better resolution per silicon chip.

There should be enough detail on that plane to tell the model. Any takers? I'd love to know the answer, just because.

Stop [SOPA/PIPA today](http://americancensorship.org/).

I've been really frustrated with Google+ slowly consuming all the rest of Google services, because I find it so deficient compared to Twitter, and even Facebook. My long form content lives here, on my own server, in my own blog. Both Twitter and Facebook make it easy to also have that content live a life in their platform.

Google+... not so much. We're more than 6 months after launch, and still no API besides scraping public posts. As such, I spend little time over there, and largely disdain the system, which doesn't loose much, because there are so few people generating content there anyway. With the launch of their "Google+ your world" search yesterday, I was even more frustrated. G+, still with no API, is now infiltrating the search rankings. Grrrr.

But this morning, I read this, and it occurred to me, what if G+ is another Chrome. By that I mean a project that isn't meant to be a market leader by itself, but one that's meant to shape a market to keep it fluid. Twitter and Facebook have a pretty epic duopoly on content right now, and they are both working to make it harder to consume outside of their bubble. This summer they both quietly killed RSS feeds off. You can still consume via their API, but even in that front Twitter's been waging a bit of a war on their API consumers, retaking the Mobile UI.

So maybe G+ was really a reaction to a trend Google was seeing, that the gated communities were throwing up more and more restrictions to making their content searchable in Google. Instead of bringing lawyers, bring technology. Make a competitor that is searchable, and get the gated communities to now really want to be included in the results. Make the market fluid again.

Maybe. I'm not sure I've even convinced my self of this. But it would explain some of the areas of focus in G+. It would also explain why public posts API is the only one they've released so far. At the end of the day, the social giant fight matters little to me, as long as I can syndicate into them, which is why the lack of G+ write API (and associated Wordpress plugin) is my biggest concern. So while this softens my feelings on G+ a little, I really do wish they'd actually make the platform way more open. Then I might feel it was worth investing in content and discussions there. Until then, you can find my quick bits over on Twitter, and the long form ideas here, with Disqus, which makes it really easy to comment or converse outside the duopoly bubble.

Update (3/22/2012): This American Life has pulled the episode because Mike Daisey's story contained a lot of fabrications. The facts of FoxConn weren't fabricated, but a lot of his personal stories and encounters were. Any statement that starts with "I have seen" is probably suspect and untrue. This original post is left below, because it was a point in time writing based on the impact the episode had on me.

How often do we wish more things were hand made. Oh we talk about that all the time, don't we. "I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch." But that's not true. There are more hand made things now then there have ever been in the history of the world. Everything is hand made. I know, I have been there, I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than a human hair, one after another, after another. Everything is hand made.

This American Life has an incredible show this past week, an adaptation of Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" for the radio. It's the story of his trip to Shenzhen, to find the origin of his iPhone.

The story is amazing. The story telling is amazing. And the questions it raises about what it means to be a part of the global economy, are interesting and thought provoking.

If you've ever owned anything that has "Made in China" stamped on it, you should listen to Mr Daisey and The Apple Factory.

Yesterday was not a good day. The reasons (plural) aren't really important for the sake of this discussion. But at 7pm, with the day behind me, and an hour and a half before my wife   was scheduled to get home from yoga, I switched over to my emacs window, and started going after a problem I've been poking at for 2 weeks.

The problem, which had nothing to do with my day job, was how to seemlessly add some javascript to date forms in Drupal to make them more magically. The date forms in Drupal are honestly quite dumb. You get presented with From and To, Date and Time. They are initialized to "now". But they are 4 fields, unlinked by code. This was the easy way for the developer to write it, but absolutely frustrating for the user. Especially if you've used systems where the To dates move forward in time to match changes in the From dates. Set From to Jan 24th, and the To date shouldn't still be Jan 11th. Making it also move to Jan 24th might not always be right, but it's almost always more right than leaving it unchanged.

I had figured out how to do this with jquery, with these fields, and have a solution for one of my sites. But this is something that would make a great Drupal module. One that requires no configuration, and just makes your user's experience better. How to get there, required banging my head a lot on internals, reading a lot of code that I thought might be examples, and not getting anywhere. Last night, frustrated with things that weren't this problem, I went after it again, this time by brute force. After about 45 minutes of trial and error, I found a hook I could use to patch myself into the execution stream at the right point. Better yet, it seemed like this was probably the right way to do it, not some dodgey hack. By the time Susan got home, I had the shell of this module mostly working. Not releasable yet, but the minimum viable piece was now done, and the rest was about cleaning up for release. I felt better. There is a longer story here about how I entered College to be a PhD Physicist, and I exited to do web development for the Sydney Olympics. But the key take away was a realization, late in my Junior year, that when I wanted to relax, I went off and coded something. While I could never point to the day it started happening, I do vaguely remember realizing that my happy place, my retreat from the stress of the world, was deep inside an emacs session for hours at a time.

The fact that the thing that relaxes me, writing software, also happens to be a key piece of a quite profitable profession[1], made me a fortunate individual. Having gone to college and watched the modern internet emerge, which is an even longer story, made me doubly so.

The best piece of advice I ever got was from my friend and mentor, Eric, in college. "The key to happiness is to figure out what you'd do anyway; then find a way to get paid to do it." Even if this wasn't my job, I'd be writing software. It's what relaxes me.

What relaxes you? What would you do if money was no object? Why did you become whatever you call your profession? Drop a comment below, because I'm actually quite interested. [1] Yes, I've been long enough in the Software Engineering space to know programming is a small part of it (especially at a large company), but it's still a very important part.

The first week of 2012 was pretty jam packed for me, which is a good thing. One of the many things that made this week busy was my talk, entitled "Getting Involved in Open Source" at MHVLUG.

This presentation was one of the hardest I've had to pull together, as well as one of the most fun to give. I had 3 entirely different slidedecks, each with their own narratives, each with their own dry runs, before I found something I felt would keep everyone engaged, not be too abstract, and time in at 1 hour. (The final dry run was 1:03, the live presentation came in at 1:05). That left plenty of time for questions, and still the ability to end the meeting by the advertised 8pm.

The focus on this talk wasn't building your own open source project, but really about interacting with various communities. I told stories about reporting bugs, fixing small features in projects, getting into flame wars, getting ignored, and becoming the accidental maintainer of projects. The core center of the talk was a tale of 3 projects: 3 drupal modules that I've submitted issues and code to, that have gone in completely different directions. This was to make the most important point of the talk: Open Source, it's made of people! When folks get involved in Open Source, they think that it's all about code. My experience has been that while the code is very important, the people are just as important. Understanding how to interact with a wide range of personality types is one of the most important skills for an open source developer. How do you get conversations rolling? How do you get your ideas listened to? When do you know it's not going to work, and a new approach is required? When do you just walk away from an idea, because it won't fit in this community?

With 37 folks in attendance, this was one of the larger MHVLUG meetings. The fact that it was also in our new location, made me really happy with those numbers. A very good way to kick off the new year.

Given that trickiness, I’ve started to wonder why pepper gets such Cadillac placement on the American table, sitting beside the salt shaker at every coffee shop and kitchen counter in the country. Why, too, do so many recipes invite us to season “with salt and freshly ground black pepper” upon completion? Why isn’t it salt and cumin, or salt and coriander, with every dish in the Western canon? What’s so special about pepper anyway? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the spice.

A fun article over on Slate about Pepper, why it's in it's role, and whether another spice might be able to replace it on our dinner table.

I got to see this at Christmas, and it brought tears to my eyes. It was put together by one of the high school students in Rochester, and used as part of his application to college. An incredible piece of work, and really gives you a sense of what was going on up there when Hurricane Irene completely cut off these towns from the rest of the world.

This is a great infographic on the kinds of planets we now know exist, and an idea of how much of the galaxy we can actually look at to find these. Very cool to be living at a time when the discovery of planets around other stars is now an every day event.

Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

When I returned to IBM Poughkeepsie after Christmas Vacation, I was startled to see this as I pulled into the parking lot. I'm not sure if they are meant to scare away the geese, the deer, or the unsuspecting programmer. Regardless, they are kind of creepy.