tags: mud

The case for MUDs in modern times

“Pull requests have also become the place where the team trains each other peer-to-peer, partially subsuming the role of manager as trainer. It’s one of the primary places where the team’s culture develops, especially if the team is distributed. It’s also the de facto information radiator for a development team, the best way to know how a product and codebase is changing over time is to be inside the code review loop.”

tags: management

Code Review Review is the Manager’s Job

“When the business side “wins”, the developers end up in a death march. When development concerns outweigh business ones, you end up blowing the budget and deadline. Either way you’re broken. Successful software managers find ways to be flexible; to bend without breaking and to resolve the tension gradually. Servant leadership can be a guide to finding this flexibility.”

tags: programming

Aaron Longwell | Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders | Culture Foundry

“The invention of the two day Scrum master training course is probably one of the worst things Scrum has done to agile. If you look at responsibilities, a good scrum master needs to be a strong technical manager with a huge grasp of organisational change, but the role is often fulfilled by a non-technical person with limited management experience from the product side of the organisation who cannot fulfil all of those responsibilities. And the idea that two days of training is sufficient to perfect and advocate major organisational change is laughable. (Indeed, most decent training companies would agree with this, and have plenty more training to sell you.)”

tags: agile

How Scrum disempowers developers (and destroys agile)

“There are several articles out there that talk about testing anti-patterns in the software development process. Most of them however deal with the low level details of the programming code, and almost always they focus on a specific technology or programming language.

In this article I wanted to take a step back and catalog some high-level testing anti-patterns that are technology agnostic. Hopefully you will recognize some of these patterns regardless of your favorite programming language.”

tags: qa

Software Testing Anti-patterns · Codepipes Blog

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Walt Whitman

To the uninitiated, MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon.  Those of us who were born in the 70s and actually had a computer in the house started off early, with Zork, or Colossal Cave, playing on a text screen for hours on end.  The next logical step was connecting the computers and going head-to-head; when modems and networked LANs became popular, so did Richard Bartle’s MUD1, or, in my own case, the Scepter of Goth.

For many of the aging-nerd set, MUDding was the door we stepped through to go on to bigger and better things. Many of my friends went from this, to EverQuest, or Ultima Online, or World of Warcraft, and have been happy gaming with friends and colleagues ever since.  The imagination was stirred, and didn’t keep quiet, always questing for a new game, a new setting to play in.

“listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”

e.e. cummings

Looking up the family tree of online games and gaming, MUDs tend to cut across a huge spectrum of categories and games.  Reading across the wikipedia article above, the links become very obvious; MUDs fired up the imagination and kept the kettle of the imagination boiling, while tech got better and better.

I stepped away from MUDding in the 80s, and came back to it in the early 2000s for a while; a whole subculture and set of terminologies had sprung up while I was gone.  I had to make sense of guilds and ‘remorting’ and all sorts of other things, while figuring out the leveling, RPing, and client mapping as well.

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”

The Matrix, 1999

I’ve been away from MUDding again for a while; I just started to come back to it last year.  I really get excited about MUDs less as a player, but more as a designer, or a Dungeon Master (which is the role I traiditonally played with my friends back in the 80s and early 90s).  Over the years I’ve been looking at different MUD code bases, starting them up, creating a few areas, pulling them apart in some cases.

MUDding ain’t dead; what we’ve been seeing over the years is a steady progression of the game, from text to graphics, and now from just graphics on a screen to augmented reality/virtual reality.  And traditional entertainment has gone along with that; whether it was the Matrix trilogy, which brought along with it several other films in that time period (I’m looking at you, Dark City and Thirteenth Floor) or Westworld garnering Emmy nominations right and left, the popular culture has always found a place for ‘virtual world’ concepts that let the imagination - and its players - run a little wild.

tags: history

Zarf Updates: Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading

tags: education

As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

“I’ve read some comments on Reddit and HackerNews along the lines of: “What an obvious mistake! How was it even possible they missed this?” (Ignoring that the “obvious” vulnerability was introduced in January and only now discovered.)

When I see responses like this, I know the people commenting are not professional developers. For a serious developer, the reaction is instead: damn, that was a dumb mistake. I’m glad I wasn’t the one who made it.

Mistakes of this sort are routinely made in programming. All programs carry the risk of developer error. We have to throw off the mindset of “if they were just more careful, this wouldn’t have happened.” At a certain scale, carefulness is not enough.”

tags: ethereum

A hacker stole $31M of Ether — how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

Someone was like, “Should the women in engineering, like, form a guild?,” and I was like, “Yeah. As long as we can have, like, a monopoly on baking and space-time travel, I’m in.” People were like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I just make Dune references.”

tags: ycombinator

Founder Stories: Kate Heddleston of Opsolutely

“That Trump was ever even taken seriously as a candidate for President of the United States (he was understandably viewed as a carnival freak-show by his adversaries and the media, each of whom hoped to fleece the suckers that gathered while the circus was in town — this too abetted his improbable rise), suggests that we have exposed the limits of our ability to competently govern ourselves.”

tags: usa

America, America - BLARB

“Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.”

tags: politics

A Time for Refusal - The New York Times

“The Stranger Things title sequence is pure, unadulterated typographic porn.”

tags: design

The Typography of ‘Stranger Things’ — Nelson Cash

“This makes me think, isn’t it better to have existing people do well, and probably become 2x or 3x. If you have a 5 member team, instead of depending on a 10x person to come and fix all your worries, if you could make your current team 2x or 3x, you already have an advantage! But how do you do that?”

tags: developers

10x or not: You’ve got to do things right — DevOps and Agile Tales

“We’re all aware that open source is an increasingly valuable part of the global economy. In this talk, I hope I’ve conveyed that, emotional rollercoaster aside, maintaining an open source project can be a hugely rewarding part of your career.”

tags: opensource

My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project

“It is, geopolitically, a victory for Putin and will weaken the West. For the centre in Europe it poses the question point blank: will you scrap Lisbon, scrap austerity and boost economic growth or let the whole project collapse amid stagnation? I predict they will not, and that the entire project will then collapse.”

tags: brexit

Brexit wins. An illusion dies.

“It’s been one of the most interesting months in the history of cryptocurrency. The price of Bitcoin has soared up to nearly $800 (then dropped to $675 as $19 million in BTC hit the market) as the reward for mining a block is soon set to be halved. Ethereum created what is arguably the world’s most complex multi-million dollar financial instrument, the DAO, only to see it hacked through a combination of flaws in its “smart contract” and the language it was implemented in. Meanwhile, the average size of a block in the Bitcoin blockchain nears 90% of the 1MB hard limit.”

tags: blockchain

A tale of two cryptocurrencies: Ethereum and Bitcoin’s ongoing challenges

“If you want a smart contract that you can actually use, you have to be certain that it is bug-free before it is deployed. there are no known tools or methods available to Solidity developers which could provide an appropriate level of certainty. Such tools will take years to be developed and until they are in common use, no Ethereum smart contract should be trusted. Ethereum is doomed.”

tags: bitcoin

Ethereum is Doomed

“The real losers are the employees. They are investing their time and their careers without access to any information. Unlike a fund who may have a portfolio of dozens or hundreds of investments, an employee can only make one investment at a time. The cost of a mistaken investment can be unemployment and the opportunity cost of foregone opportunities. Unlike investors who are making their investments after meeting with the company and performing due diligence, interviews don’t tend to work like due diligence sessions…”

“LinkedIn notes that Theranos has between 501–1000 employees. How much information did they have before they joined? What sort of due diligence could they perform? The answer, as with most other private companies, is almost none.”

tags: startups

TherOhNos: Who Really Gets Hurt When Startups Blow Up?

Happy Easter!  I’m emerging from  a long hiberation of blogging, and will start to post more here, over time.

Instagram: http://ift.tt/1NdgQay

This post was originally inspired by the blog post How to become (nearly) fluent in German, care of Cultural Vistas. 

I get compliments on my Russian all the time.  Wait, that’s not true.  I get compliments on my spoken Russian all the time, by other students of Russian.  But that counts for something, right?  Seriously, though, I tend to clam up about my own Russian skill, even though it’s something I’ve been doing for about the last twenty years or so.

I got bitten by the ‘Russian bug’ in what would become the Bard-Smolny program, which at the time was sending students from Bard College to Leningrad, USSR.  A few weeks after I arrived the city where I landed in August of 1991 became St. Petersburg, but the boarding pass still said ‘Leningrad’ on it.

Ever since then I’ve traveled back and forth between the US and the NIS, often for work, but not always.  My third time back I went with the Alfa-Bank Fellowship Program in 2006, which placed me in Moscow for a year and gave me the contacts to find a job there shortly thereafter. Nowadays, I spend time in Ukraine, and I’ve been here since 2009.

So, how did I do it?  How did I become so good in Russian?  I would put it down to three things:

1. Humility, and a sense of humor: I still make many many mistakes in Russian every day.  People on the street can hear my accent.  That business never changes.  I accept that.  Despite this, I can understand almost everything that I hear, and comprehend everything that I read (Google Translate helps, though).  I use that to my advantage, more often than not, and can make myself understood.  That’s the goal.  I also have the ability to laugh at myself when I make a mistake.  I’m sure there’s a blog post out there about all the similarities and differences between Russian and English, I won’t like to it here, but they are many, and they are strange.
2. Willingness to get out there and interact with native speakers: were there a lot of days when I thought my Russian sucked, and no matter what I would say I would sound like an idiot?  Sure there were.  It didn’t stop me from getting out there and talking to people.  Even when I was a student, in 1991 Russia there were not a lot of Americans out there, and invitations to exchange Russian for English were plenty.  Even today, with my work experience I’m invited to speak at a number of places, and I can turn that into an interaction in Russian when I want.
3. Intellectual curiosity and the desire to find out more: together with humility, I am always interested in listening a bit more to Russians (or Ukrainians) speaking Russian.  Even turning on the TV over here is always hilarious, as there’s always something else that is being stated or said or shouted in Russian that I haven’t heard before.

Related to point #3 above, there are a number of films that helped me learn.  Over the course of the last twenty years I have seen each of these movies at least once, and they have moved my knowledge of spoken and cultural Russian ahead, if just a tiny bit:

Ironiya Sudbi, ili S Legkim Parom (1975) - Soviet comedy?  It sounds like a contradiction in terms.  However, there were a full set of films from this period that were funny and light-hearted, not even counting the Soviet animation greats (I’m looking right at you, Cheburashka).  While Ironiya is text-heavy and has fewer sight gags than some of the others, it captures the spirit of the Soviet (and now Russian) theme of the ‘New Year’s Eve Film’.  Other films in this theme included Kavkazskaya Plennitsa, or Gentlemen of Fortune.

Stalker (1979) - Dark, moody Soviet science fiction, the films of Andrey Tarkovsky are rich, verdant images with few, but powerful lines.  I had to watch with subtitles all the way through when I was still a student, despite that his films never disappointed.

Taxi Blues (1990) - One of the first pictures to make it out of the USSR to depict its late-eighties, end-of-empire, crumbling beauty.  Every hero was an antihero, every soul exposed a dark Russian soul, a lonely loner, not worth saving.  Other films in this theme include Igla, starring pop-icon Viktor Tsoy, or Interdevochka.

Nochnoi Dozor (2004) - Vampires in Moscow!  This is the film that starts to take Russian film-making to the next level, as it’s helmed by charismatic Russian actors and actresses and the very talented Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (think Wanted, etc).  Compare this with the grainy shots from Brat 2 and you can already see that the film industry undergoing a turn to modern action and fantasy in under four years.

Turetskiy Gambit (2005) - Also from the same modern style as Nochnoi, but following the exploits of one Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a Russian answer to Sherlock Holmes, depicted in the novels of Boris Akunin.  This film follows the adventures of Fandorin as Russia wars against Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

Viy (2014) - My final recommendation, and ironically the one film that is related to Russian literature the most as it’s inspired by the stories of Gogol.  Witches and demons terrorize a small Ukrainian village.  Somehow a foreign visitor from England gets involved.  No political foreshadowing here, hmm.

UPDATE 2026: Note that most of these films are awash in Russian or Soviet propaganda, so I don’t recommend them any more outside of Russian language learning. The only film I would recommend on artistic merits at this time is 1994’s Burnt by the Sun.

“Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.”

tags: inspiration

The days are long but the decades are short

“Every hour you put in working on your project for free is a gift to the world. If the world comes back to you and says “You are a bad person for not supporting this thing I need you to support” then fuck them. If they want that they should pay you for it, or do it themselves.”

tags: opensource

It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty

“I see Russia as a country in decline. It’s a one-crop economy; two-thirds of its exports are energy. It has a terrible demographic problem; the number of Russians is shrinking. It has a huge health problem; the average Russian male dies at about age 61. And it’s got such enormous corruption that it can’t reform itself. So I think it’s a country that’s seriously in decline.

Putin’s adventurism, such as we’ve seen in Ukraine, which has led to Western sanctions, cuts him off from the sources of Western technology that they really need for modernisation and he’s turning Russia into China’s gas station. So I’m very pessimistic about the future of Russia.”

tags: russia

Russia in decline - Joseph Nye

“Help Ukraine. They have terrific outsourcing shops and consulting firms. Send them business if you can. Recent revolution would unlock even more creative force in this economically modest, yet energetic country.”

tags: russia

No Russian - The Vault of the Future

“When outsiders talk about YC, they talk about its novel structure. But that’s only half of what YC is. The other half is our people and culture. That’s what I’ve focused on for the last decade, and that’s the half of YC that no one else has been able to duplicate.”

tags: culture

The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator

“I get asked a lot about what software consulting (aka freelancing) is like. Full-time salaried software developers tend to be the most curious. This post is a collection of observations I’ve made from my brief time as a consultant.”

tags: career

Consulting

Her work is haunting, ephemeral, and is all recorded by one person. I strongly recommend buying it, listening to it, as it stays with you over time.

tags: music

Into The Trees

He believes that the priority of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is to “keep Ukraine bubbling,” no matter the financial costs. Mr. Pomerantsev fears that the financial pressures and Western sanctions, instead of compelling Mr. Putin to change course, are likely to make Russia more closed and dictatorial.

tags: russia

A Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine

GITenberg.github.io by GITenberg

Forgive your exes, even the awful ones. They were just winging it, too.

tags: advice

What You Learn in Your 40s

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code

14 Wild Ideas

Блог Александра Тривайло: Мой список лучшей деловой литературы

In short, congratulations are due to the entire staff of TEDxKharkov!

The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang 윈 - 모스크바 - 두만강 - 평양: How everything began….

HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

“Now when you leave school you move back home. You take public transportation or borrow your parents car. The only thing new you buy is the cheap work outfit you need. Savings ? Forgettaboutit. It’s not happening. Your entire focus is on hitting your monthly nut for school debt , credit card and maybe a car or apartment. The crush of college debt has taken an entire generation of graduates, current and future out of the economy. Which is exactly why the economy hasn’t grown and won’t grow beyond microscopic growth rates we have seen so far.”

tags: education

The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon

Unni test [slideshare id=12295350&w=425&h=355&sc=no]

View more presentations from Yuriy Litvinenko

I also gave a talk, I’ll expect to post the slides after a few.

I went with @ala_manzana, who did a great job live-tweeting the whole thing. You can look up most of her pictures through the #TEDxKh hashtag.

Pictures of the event are popping up all over, you can already catch some of them here and here, for example.

The live speakers for the event were, in the following order:

• The Master of Ceremonies, Sergei Lavrik
• Professor of Mathematics Dmitry Yelchaninov
• Activist and Doctor Anna Gerashchenko
• Alexander Yesyukov, Director and President of TeamDev
• Physicist Yuri Erin
• Doctor Igor Kostyuk
• Student (and future automotive engineer) Alexander Chernyshyov
• Pedagogue Valeriy Leyko
• Max Burtsev, Founder of the ad agency “Arriba”

Quite frankly, each speaker deserves their own post. Especially the last speaker. They were all good, they all had a high level of enthusiasm, energy, and a positive message. When the vidoes are online, I’ll be sure to post each one of them with an explanation.

In the first video of the day, Mitchell Joachim spoke about the possibility of architecture and biology merging with one another and giving us the ability to grow our own homes:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw9s0ivfn3w&w=560&h=315]

In the second video of the day, we saw that it’s possible to make a lightweight bird fly, with the help of Markus Fischer and his team:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_JcKSHUtQ&w=560&h=315]

In the third video of the day, Benjamin Zander spoke about how to make everyone a classical music lover. This was especially a big hit with the crowd, both recorded and in the hall:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LCwI5iErE&w=560&h=315]

In short: it was great. The organizers did a super job. This is definitely not the last time I’ll attend a TEDx in Kharkiv, and definitely not the last time I’ll write about this event. I had a great time, and I am sure the organizers are happy (and relieved) that the event went as planned. Stay tuned for the next post about TEDxKharkiv…

The theme for today’s meeting was “полезные советы” or Useful Advice. After a few annoucements we started watching the vidoes.

The first video we saw and discussed was with Jessi Arrington and her theme of ‘wearing nothing new’. She always finds interesting outfits from second-hand stores. This was kind of a weak lead-in for Ukrainians who didn’t know what TED was all about (I saw some people leave right away), and also a strange talk because of the stark difference between second-hand stores in Ukraine vs. second-hand stores in the USA.

EDIT: check out more about Jessi Arrington here. I didn’t want that above paragraph to sound negative about Jessi, but it wasn’t TED’s best introduction, IMO.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYwvyjIDk80&w=560&h=315]

The next film was from TEDx Odessa, Boris Khodorkovsky talked about how to manage the barrage of information we accumulate, and how to filter it best:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqh8bT70e1Y&w=560&h=315]

Our third film was from Thomas Thwaites and his efforts to build a toaster from scratch. Here’s where the talks really started to engage me and the rest of the audience at the IT_Cafe.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw&w=560&h=315]

The fourth film was clearly the best of all the films; from TEDx Vorobyovy Gory, professional business trainer Radislav Gandapas talked about how to motivate the ’energy inside us’.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZS_Nu10770&w=560&h=315]

The next video was James Cameron, describing his work between Titanic and Avatar.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUJGrViwryY&w=560&h=315]

What followed were several funny vidoes from TED: one from Jenny Mccarthy about the virtues of marriage, and the next from Charlie Todd’s Improv Everywhere:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddrIKWVnyZ4&w=560&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooUqOwh-2LE&w=560&h=315]

While the whole event was a bit long (I had to truck out of there right at 12:30, when it ended), I enjoyed going and hope they’ll keep doing it after the TEDxKharkiv event next week.

TEDxKharkiv tickets are on sale here, the event is taking place March 31 at Sun City 2 Trade Center, near the Moskovsky Prospect Metro.

tags: writing

Letters of Note: I am a lousy copywriter

Yes, actually it IS too bad! … But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.”

tags: money

The True Cost of Commuting

Why and How I Migrated from Posterous to Self-Hosted WordPress

Put This On, Episode 7: Personal Style from Put This On on Vimeo.

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative on Vimeo.

Via Boing Boing.

via vimeo.com

Really great vid about the ABCs of client management for designers and developers. The skinny: good contract management = good client management. Speech by Mike Monteiro of Mule Design (http://muledesign.com) and part of SF’s Creative Mornings (http://creativemornings.org).

via vimeo.com

Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. Part of an ongoing series of inventor portraits. More can be seen at http://dfpblog.com/inventors.>

Reposted from Hooray for the bleeding edge via email.

via vimeo.com

Documentary about startups made by people from Iceland! Support then through Kickstarter, at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestartupkids/the-startup-kids-0

via vimeo.com

Fascinating vid, found through Boing Boing.

via vimeo.com

Wish I could have gone. Maybe next year.

via vimeo.com

Just Brilliant. No other way to say it.

The Best Thing I Ever Done HQ from MargaretEmily MacKenzie on Vimeo.

Incredible, enduring story of Dom DiMarco, who has operated the best
pizzeria in NYC for 45 years.

Reposted from Hooray for the bleeding edge via email.

Let’s say you’re hiring for a startup.  Resources are limited.  Your office space, if you can call it that, is five square meters of closet space that you rented from your aunt because it was the Decent Thing To Do.  Devil-may-care about the lack of heating or the moldy carpet or the fluorescent lights, the point is, you got a good deal.  You found that desk at a yard sale.  The chairs were donated from a church.  Let’s not even get into phones, computers, or security.

So where was I?  Resources.  Right.  You have none.  But you have a vision.  And you are sure that it will KICK ASS ON THE WEB as soon as you can get it to work.  To work your way.  No exceptions.

But for that to work out, you need a hot-shot developer.  Someone who can make the code sing, or at least bend it to your will.  You already have some code out there, but the last developer you had quit on you, they got a year of experience and got to the next rung in their career.  Away from you.  And that armpit of an office you work in.

But you need to attract someone better than the last one.  And you need him to clean up that code, and make it work the way you want.  And you need to get a good deal.

You want someone who is cheap.

You want someone who won’t protest, at least not as badly as the last developer.

And he/she has to put up with your jokes, your office, the ghastly coffee you make in the kitchenette in the morning.

You’re not really looking for a “Rock star” at all.  You’re looking for the Ditchdigger.  The developer who, when given an assignment, won’t balk or fight back or anything, but just work work work.  You can’t say that out loud though.  No-one graduated with a CS degree from Yale or MIT and said ‘ditchdigging here I come!’ so you have to dress it up a bit.  Give it some flash-bang, some gee-whiz.  Some instant cool.  So you figured out a name that would evoke a little rock-n-roll, something that smacked of fandom.

And hey, you didn’t have to invest any time in hard things.  Things like company culture.  Things like passion for the idea.  Things like a community for the product.  Things like infrastructure.  These things don’t cost money, but they take time to build and hey, let’s face it, they’re hard to do.

So, instead of calling the developers ‘cattle’ or ‘sheep’ or ‘Ditchdiggers’ you called them ‘Rock stars’ because you wanted to attract the best with all that you had going for you - smoke and mirrors.  Pat yourself on the back for that one.  You’ll probably get a few good eggs.  Two employees, maybe three, maybe five.  Just watch out when you start landing larger and larger projects.

Why be cautious?  Because ‘Rock stars’ are individuals, after all, they want all the fame, all the attention, all the glory for themselves - and they don’t necessarily work in teams.  Ditchdiggers can get along; rock stars often don’t.

Reflect on this, for a moment, and think about putting more effort into that job description, besides the words Rock and Star.

“The quality of coworkers is the single greatest determinant of workplace happiness”

“Hiring is a zero-sum game. Candidates that don’t join your company will join a competitor’s, and your loss will be their gain. If hiring isn’t your number one priority, it’s unlikely you’ll be number one at hiring”

“Successfully hiring the best people at all levels means that down the road, your internal promotion pipeline is strong” - which means that people won’t walk out the door on the first opportunity.

via drugoi.livejournal.com

Now it’s President Yanukovych. This might take some getting used to.

Posted via web from Hooray for the bleeding edge

If it were up to me, I’d never go to another interview ever again.  I’m sure many of you feel that same way – otherwise we’d never do things like YCombinator.

However, interviews test us.  They put pressure on us.  Only then, do we find out a little more about ourselves.  

I talked my way into an interview with Red Hat in early 2002.  Was it the Red Hat that flies you down to NC for a full-on, multi-day interview?  Not exactly.  This was with the team that had been ‘bought’ by Red Hat from ArsDigita Corp not two months before, and was located on route 495 in Massachusetts.  I use the term ‘bought’ loosely, since Philip Greenspun pointed out that it wasn’t really the case in his chapter of Founders At Work.

For this interview, I had to submit a code sample.  I forwarded a piece from my last project, a Java servlet which I had slaved over for a few months in the basement of where I worked in 2002, of which I’ll talk about later.  (Or never.  Imagine ‘The Office’ plus ‘IT Crowd’ plus, oh hell I don’t know, ‘Deliverance’.  I’m just kidding, maybe.)

I realize now that this code sucked.  It was a Magic Servlet, about as magic as they come, with SQL and HTML and all the rest of the crud mixed in there.  I shouldn’t even have gotten my foot in the front door, but I did help one of their engineers move furniture, so I suppose all that back pain was worth something.

So, when I walked in the door that morning, I had about a half-year experience coding ‘in the industry’ and a lot of practice coding all sorts of projects at ArsDigita University.  I was not, in other words, a Non-programming Programmer, I could work with it, but there was definitely room for improvement.

There were seven engineers on the team.  They needed an eighth.  I was interviewed by every single one in one day.  On the face of it, this didn’t seem like a bad idea until, oh, after interview number 5.  Interviewer #5.  I’ll never recall his name, but I’ll never forget him. 

Up until him, the interviews had been fairly upbeat – there was the Databases Guy, the Systems Guy, the Internationalization Guy.  There had been some technical questions but nothing that really stressed me out.  Number 5 had a different beat altogether.  Definitely what you’d call ‘down tempo’.

First of all, he wore the Brass Rat.  The thing about the Brass Rat in Massachusetts is that, since there are so many MIT grads there already, you can already sniff them out without the extra bling.  Most MIT grads I know got their Rat, wore it for a while, and then put it away when they realized a) it wasn’t going to get them laid, and b) it wouldn’t get them ahead in the job market in Massachusetts, because there’s this liberal arts college down the road named Harvard that puts out pretty smart graduates too.

However, Interviewer #5 didn’t get that memo.  He seemed pretty proud about that ring.  Especially since he started to tap it repeatedly against the table as we were having the interview.  To add insult to injury, he pulled out the printout of my code.  Marked up.  With comments and highlighting.

I don’t remember much about that part of the interview except the tap tap tapping of that ring against the table.  Snatches of it come back to me sometimes in horrible dreams: “I see this block of code here…” tap tap tap “…seems purely procedural in nature…” tap tap tap “…could you explain to me why you are accessing the session so many times?”

It was like Chinese water torture.  I completely came unglued and couldn’t come up with any concise or confident answers at all.  It didn’t help that the interviewer after him was the UML Guy, who was all over me to come up with a correct UML Diagram for my code.

I walked away with some bruised pride, and a wasted day.  But it did teach me to get a little better at what I did.  I read the Bitter Java book.  I started to learn about MVC.  More importantly, I kept interviewing.  I finally got another job – the job I have now, actually – and I’m still programming,

Happy New Year!, originally uploaded by tom_hickerson.

Have not been here in a long where, but Google kept my account safe and sound. Maybe I’ll come back and play, someday.

Saving this to look at later. See a 10-day party in 5 minutes!

A strike by the MiskElectroTrans Company, as a result of which no trolleybuses and trams operated today in Kharkiv, is a one-day action that could be stepped up in the near future, union officials have said.

via kyivpost.com

Saw it yesterday - it was nuts. Rumor is that it is continuing today.

via flickr.com

Twenty years ago, I graduated from high school. More importantly, twenty years ago I turned 18 and left Texas for the first time. In August of 1989, I arrived at Bard College in upstate New York, and started college.

It was a wild ride. Looking back now, after all that time, I see it was also a short ride. Among my Bard College experiences was my first trip to Russia, studying in St Petersburg’s Herzen Institute. I also had the fortune to meet a lot of different, interesting, dynamic people along the way.

Five years later, I would graduate, but not from Bard. I got my BA from the University of Texas, and while that was a fine place to study, it wasn’t my first choice. I voluntarily left Bard, because I got tired of what I called “small college bullshit”, but it is a decision that I think about every once in a blue moon. I don’t regret it, but I think about it.

If you ever get a chance to find yourself near Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, take a tour of Bard College. Its campus is prettier than most. The architecture is eclectic, but if you look at one of the many different places, you will be able to see a certain charm to it. At least that’s the way I remember it.

(CC licensed photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelbd/2484391412/in/photostream/)

(The above pic is from Blithewood, which used to be a all-girls dorm but then became an economics institute. Rumor was that the nearby mansion was haunted. FYI.)

Secrecy, indifference, and conflicts mar investigations into journalist deaths. Moscow has a responsibility to uphold the rule of law. Its international partners have an obligation, too.

via cpj.org

from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

What we’re talking about, then, is a possible revolution in workplace training, one where a lifetime of experience would ideally be sucked from the mind of an experienced worker to be injected into a trainee and then the older worker discarded.

via cringely.com

AI and training is back in vogue at IBM. And they’ve patented every piece of it.

Today marks the 18th year Ukraine has been an independent country. I have been in and around Ukraine for about seven of those eighteen.

Things I have learned about Ukraine in that time are the following:

1. Ukrainians don’t like it when others call their country ‘THE Ukraine’. I should say English-speaking Ukrainians don’t like it, since there is no ’the’ in the Ukrainian language.

2. Ukrainians aren’t afraid to class it up a bit. The above photo is just a taste of what I am talking about here. You see that? Classy stuff, there.

3. Never save money in Ukrainian currency. Never transfer money to a Ukrainian bank unless you know that bank’s president. In fact, try to route around the entire financial system by dealing in cash and foreign accounts. Can’t stress that enough.

4. Trains are fun. More on that later.

5. Gorilka and Salo. If you haven’t tried it you don’t know what you are missing.

Happy Independence Day!

90% of our debt is educational. That really pisses me off; you’re told as a naive 18 year old that college is the only way to guarantee a career. So you do whatever it takes to secure that education, which may mean unwittingly borrowing from less-than-scrupulous lenders, and upon graduation you discover that hey, that degree isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and you’re going to wind up working in a crappy job outside of your field anyway, and why didn’t anyone tell you that diesel mechanics make three times what you owe the government after just 18 months of training as opposed to four years of classes you’re never going to need, like ‘Comparative Religions’ and ‘Carmen: Novel, Opera, Film’?!?

via huffingtonpost.com

Not an uncommon problem. I had to work outside my field after getting my first IT degree. After that, I had a ’never go hungry again’ attitude and kept a job even through most of graduate school. That at least kept my debt down to a manageable level.

A very cool-looking Stevie Wonder here.

Posted via web from Hooray for the bleeding edge

This month he came back to Russia to resign his position, and ship all of his things back home. He leaves on Tuesday, and will probably stay in the US until his wife becomes a full US citizen, which he estimates will take four years.

“I’m just tired,” he said, “we’re all tired of the hassle.”

His hassle, in particular, was getting a return visa for his four-month old child. Since he had been born in Moscow but granted an American passport, the Russian Embassy put up all sorts of grief and eventually demanded that the parents provide an HIV test for the child. At four months of age. In two days.

Mr. X was the third American in the last week that has told me he’s ready to pull up stakes and head out of Russia. Before that, I knew a few people in the Alfa Fellowship Program who ended their assignment in late April, and were all ready to head back (previously some had always been able to get a job and stay on).

I don’t really care to write about my own situation here in Moscow, but for the average expat, things are bleaker than they were last year. A rising ruble rate has given many expats an unexpected ‘haircut’ for those whose contacts were originally denominated in rubles. A crackdown on visas and registration for all foreigners increased the level of bureaucracy that expats have to deal with here across the board.

Me? I am hanging tough for the time being, but I have no illusions that it will get any better soon. It will get lonely for the summer, but then a new group of expats will arrive with the next Alfas. And I’ll keep looking, to see what happens next. Because let’s face it, in Moscow something always happens next.

Auntie Mel posted some more of her artwork on Flickr. Some of her earlier stuff is here.

Monday Inspiration: Creative Workplaces | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine

Compare this to the five dollars and 20 cents from the Diesel in Somerville, MA:

Some quick links:

• Ukrainiana posts vids of all the political adverts – with English translations.
• Election day as it happens posted here from Orange Ukraine. My fave is the story about how Donetsk’s mayor can’t vote because he left the country a month ago.
• Another entertaining piece from Orange Ukraine: Voter lists were already askew two days before the election.
• Foreign Notes is posting a bookmaker’s opinion about who will win the elections.
• And a nice roundup of billboard poses from Petro’s Jotter. There’s the braid…then the glasses…

PS - Larger picture of her father is here.

pre-Monday

As part of the Alfa, I got a conference budget of around $1000 for the whole year. Many fellows spent this in many different ways. One fellow went to Ekaterininburg for a tax conference, another went to St. Pete's for a legal development conference, a third went all the way to Brussels for an oil & gas conference, etc. Since my main bent was and always is IT, I was looking for ways to get into something related to that. In October, I went to the first-annual New Economy Conference in the Manezh and spent a bit of it there. (In general, I don't mind going to conferences, but you do have to remember to move your butt and talk to people because that's why you're there. That is something for another post.)

So, in short, I had about $200-$300 left to spend on conferences at the end of the year. I started looking through CNews and found RIT 2007. Signed up online, I just had to trot on down a couple of blocks from my apartment to the InfoProstrantsvo conference center to register at 9am on Monday.

Monday

I show up around 9:15, and find...a huge huge line to registration. Welcome to Russia, I think to myself. After about twenty mintues to get through the line and find my last name, I get a handwritten badge with "Uchastnik" as the bottom, so I guess I am good to go.

RIT 2007 had about 700 participants, and I think the hall was built for about 500 people. So that was the first (and major) problem at the event.

We kicked off the opening with some remarks from one of the leaders at the Russian search engine Yandex, whose basic premise was "People outside of Russia think we have nothing, but in fact Russians have always made significant contributions to computer science and it's the same case with the Internet." Sergei Brin was mentioned as an example, but the expert could have easily mentioned Sergei Burkov of Google Moscow, or the Ozon.ru team which landed $18mln recently.

Another speaker also mentioned that "We don't need outside markets to make a good Internet product, the Russian market is big enough on it's own." Which is more or less true; with a country of 140mln people, almost 30mln are online.

After the opening, we started the actual program with a presentation from Igor Sysoyev, one of the chief programmers of Rambler, presenting "nginx - Why it's Needed, Current and Future Abilities" and "Setup of FreeBSD For Handling 100-200 Thousand Connections" back to back.

The other sessions I went to on Monday were the following:

• "AJAX Security" by Alexei Karpanov,
• "JavaScript for Rick User Interfaces - An Overview of Frameworks" by Andrey Okonechnikov and Leonid Khatchaturov,
• "JavaScript Decisions for Development of Large Projects" by Andrey Sumin,
• "CSS Management" by Vadim Makeyev,
• and "How to conduct \[technical\] Interviews" by Irina Klyusova.

After that I had to take off, which leads us into...

Tuesday

The conferences I saw today were:

• "Process of developing web-projects from the Management Point of View", by Alexei Sidorenko,
• "How Should we Organize work for Usability-developers", by Platon Dneprovskiy (picture above from his slides),
• "The profession of the Front-end Architect", arguably the best presentation of the conference IMO, by Andrei Okonechnikov,
• "Important principles of work with text and encoding", by Oleg Andreev,
• An Investment presentation from a venture capitalist (the original presenter wasn't able to come, so this gentleman filled in),
• The Master-class "JsHttpRequest: Cross Browser AJAX, background downloading of files, 'transparent' programming of backend scripts" by Dmitriy Koterov,
• "Experience of using MySQL in LiveInternet.ru", by Maxim Bystrov and Andrei Guryanov,
• and "PostgreSQL in Web applications: Failover, Load Balancing, Replication, and Production", by Ivan Zolotykhin.

I could've seen a lot more if I had stayed after 5pm on each day.

Couple of other observations about the rest of the conference:

• I was probably the only foriegner there, and looking through the different pages about the conference, I am pretty sure that there are no English links or translations about this event. (Not like they need it, it's not the organizer's target audience)
• Like I said above, 700 people, 500 limit. I missed a few sessions because I was in the lunch line for about ninety minutes trying to eat.
• Free wifi + very few power outlets = frustration. However, we were there to meet people, not check Gmail every forty minutes.
• Most sessions were great. Some were very surface-level, i.e. Introduction to this, introduction to that. Many more details were covered in the "master-classes", which I wish I had gone to more of.
• Frustrations among many Russian web designers that are not felt in the US; Cyrillic character encoding. Lots of presentations had to address this before they got to the tech. A certain Joel on Software article was referenced to in presentations as being "need to know".
• One of my main concerns was originally "Where's the Java?" but then I started to read about Sun's TechDay seminars in St. Pete's, which happened right before this. Something for next year, I guess.
• These people worked their asses off. I mean everyone: organizers, speakers, participants. RIT 2007 went for two days from 10am to 8pm, and people were there to make sure presenters didn't go over time. No other conference in Moscow kept to time as well, or went so late into the evening.

In short, I had fun. I will try to post notes about specific sessions and add more links as necessary. I would really like to add a translation of some of the web-sessions as I find them online.

Other relevant links and photos (all in Russian):

• RIT 2007 website
• Impressions of RIT
• RIT Postmortem
• Lots of RIT photos
• Some RIT Videos, most notably "Ashmanov's Rules" about Agile programming.
• More about Java: Sun's Techdays presentations, all in one convenient place (Hint hint RIT)

I remember when I started learning Java. It was 1999. Applets were the only thing that we could get to work on the web, and maybe JSP and Servlets were starting to get there for server-side programming. The only other thing that was out there was the Enterprise-level programming of EJB, which confused the majority of us out there and made us want to do something else.

So in 2002, someone introduced me to Struts, and it looked like a breath of fresh air. Since then, other programmers have been quietly (or not so quietly) churning out tool after tool that we can use. Hibernate. Velocity. Tapestry. Grinder. DbUnit. The list keeps unfolding for us.

A recent post entitled, How to use Java at a Startup, puts forth the argument that Java is all you need. He does point out, however, that the overchoice is a double edged sword:

There are so many options available that it is possible to get stuck in analysis paralysis while you look for that perfect fit. I do this all the time. In my quest for the perfectly elegant solution I get myself perfectly puzzled. It’s also possible to pick technologies that just don’t work together very well. I find that the best way to narrow down the list is to make your best guess and then prototype the technologies to see if they meet your need. Remember, a good plan violently executed today will be better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow. That said, you do need criteria for evaluating Open Source projects for use in a startup.

We had some lean times with Java; maybe that's what spurred all the growth of frameworks and the over-choice we have today. Now that we've come through the lean period though, do we make that memory drive what Java will be tomorrow? Will our memory of the absence of good features and the ability to execute quickly change how we develop Java 6?

Again, I am disappointing by putting forth more questions than answers, but there is a point to all this. How do you stick to your guns with one part of the technology when there is new, promising technology that claims to be a 'silver bullet' that will take its place? How do you know when to stop moving from new framework to new framework? ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-05-the-finnish-line/Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-05-the-finnish-line/And now, the Helsinki Complaints Choir:And now, the Helsinki Complaints Choir:

]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-05-ukrainian-students/Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-05-ukrainian-students/Ah, to be a student again and have the free time to do this:Ah, to be a student again and have the free time to do this:

]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-04-banking-woes-and-worries/Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2007/2007-02-04-banking-woes-and-worries/Over at Boingboing, Cory Doctorow has discovered to his horror that Banks and Credit Card companies take a little advantage of you when you use your card abroad; they charge a 3 to 5 percent ’transaction fee’ whenever you buy anything. I discovered this when I used my MasterCard for the first time over here; what do you know, it was also the last time I used it over here. Since then, I have more or less gone entirely cardless in Russia, instead taking small sums of cash out of the ATMs here through my credit union.Over at Boingboing, Cory Doctorow has discovered to his horror that Banks and Credit Card companies take a little advantage of you when you use your card abroad; they charge a 3 to 5 percent ’transaction fee’ whenever you buy anything. I discovered this when I used my MasterCard for the first time over here; what do you know, it was also the last time I used it over here.

Since then, I have more or less gone entirely cardless in Russia, instead taking small sums of cash out of the ATMs here through my credit union. The credit union charges a $1 transaction for each withdrawl and that is it; no percentages and no huge fees like at Bank of America, etc. Through most ATMs here you can get not only roubles, but dollars or euros, whatever your pleasure.

I like the quote at the end that sums it all up for me, and most of the Americans on the Alfa Fellowship:

Truly American credit unions are a savior in a land of high fee thief banks. The idea that people can gather together and work in a non-profit way to make their lives better is a model that others needing essentials services should emulate. If America isn’t going to offer universal healthcare for it’s citizens then they should band together and make non-profit health care insurance unions. If there’s one area of life that needs a non-profit union of citizens more than banking it’s definitely health care.

In short, if you’re coming to Russia for a while, check out opening an account at USAA or another credit union and using that for most of your banking, instead of a CitiBank clone.

I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing....So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-21-my-tech-predictions-for-2008/Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-21-my-tech-predictions-for-2008/I know what you're thinking: this guy's not to swift with his maths, but work with me for a minute here. Everyone is putting out their predictions for 2007. Let's face it, 2007 is just ten days away now, so it's easy to do. We could have all written 'my predicitions for July' in June, and it would have the same impact. Sys-con and RWW put out their lists, and overall it seemed like tame stuff.I know what you're thinking: this guy's not to swift with his maths, but work with me for a minute here. Everyone is putting out their predictions for 2007. Let's face it, 2007 is just ten days away now, so it's easy to do. We could have all written 'my predicitions for July' in June, and it would have the same impact.

Sys-con and RWW put out their lists, and overall it seemed like tame stuff. Ajax is hyped/not hyped. Open-sourcing Java is good/not good. Rinse and repeat.

The best of the list was Bob Zurek's predictions, chock full of intelligent wikis and predictive networks. Mmm, tasty.

Without any more pretense, here are my predictions for 2008:

1. AJAX begins its downward spiral as entire communities move to web on the mobile phone and all that Javascript breaks in the browser. Huge disenchantment follows, and the simplicity folks win this battle with bare-bones HTML+CSS design.
2. The final word on Ruby is said, in the form of a performance benchmark which validates Ruby's place in the web enterprise. This will shut up naysayers, and be a rallying cry for the Ruby community at-large. This will also be the nail in the coffin for Sun, see number 3.
3. Open-sourcing Java does nothing for Sun as a company as its market share is eaten alive by C# on one side and by Python/Ruby on the other. JDK7 is a fine product, but will be remembered much like IBM's OS/2, which failed as a 'technically superior, but marketed inferior' product. Expect a buyout as its routers are less and less popular, especially with the rise of the Chinese Internet (see number 6).
4. Outsourcing comes back to the US after the housing bubble finally takes 18 months to deflate and the cost of living in the US recedes. A major Indian or Russian industry opens up shop in the US and attracts thousands of applicants, like Wal-Mart opening up in middle America. Indian players could include Tata, while Russian players could be Verysell or Luxoft.
5. Microsoft finally figures out how to make search work and Google's greatest fear is realized; the contents of search between Yahoo, MSFT and Google are not only similar but indistinguishable. Google, having known this fear since 2005, will have created another revenue stream (probably phones or OS) so that it can remain a contender.
6. And the money shot: China unveils its own Internet (either v6 or v10) in the wake of the Beijing Olympics, dwarfing the efforts by the US and ICANN to retain control of the world network. This, together with lack of Net Neutrality, will divide and conquer the Internet and create online haves and have-nots, just like the real world. Sad but true.

I would be wildly ignorant not to post something about the Carl Sagan Blogathon which is going on all day today, December 20th. There is also a Celebrate Sagan Blog, for those without blogs, to post something about their memories of Sagan.

Where would we be without 'Billions of Billions'? Where would we be without Cosmos? Some of my earlier memories include watching the series and hearing the music that went with it. Hearing Vangelis even now takes me back. I find it somewhat ironic that this week is also when the Russian media is taking a look back at the reign of Leonid Ilych Brezhnev, whose 100th birthday was on the 19th of December.

The very real fear of nuclear holocaust from Brezhnev and the aging generation of Soviets clearly played a part of what Sagan called the 'starship of the imagination' which flew between planets and observed other civilizations, worlds and stars, some at war, some at peace.

In many ways, Sagan's work was the beginning of a process to unite us as a human race, before we embarked on the space race. This day reminds me that I am behind on my reading in a big way, and that we would all be better off if we read a little Sagan now and then. I'll try to update this post with Saganesque links in the next few days.

Update: I found a good quote from the Skeptical Inquirer, which has a long press conference with Carl Sagan. This, I think, is part of the essence of what he stood for, to use science to inspire others.

I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend on. If it isn?t presented that way, if it?s presented in very dull textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-18-pans-labyrinth-mirrormask-it-aint/Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-18-pans-labyrinth-mirrormask-it-aint/Oh, man. We went to go see the Russian translation of Pan's Labyrinth (Lavirint Favna), and what can I say; I haven't wanted my money back from a movie in quite a while. From watching the trailer, you are drawn into the idea that the movie will be a message of triumph over evil, and that all will be well. Much like another movie that played last summer, Mirrormask, it is about a young girl with a mother in peril.Oh, man. We went to go see the Russian translation of Pan's Labyrinth (Lavirint Favna), and what can I say; I haven't wanted my money back from a movie in quite a while.

From watching the trailer, you are drawn into the idea that the movie will be a message of triumph over evil, and that all will be well. Much like another movie that played last summer, Mirrormask, it is about a young girl with a mother in peril. Like Mirrormask, she journeys into a world of the imagination, which is generated in rich detail for the viewer. Like Mirrormask, she is compelled to complete a quest to make her mother well again and save the day. Unlike Mirrormask, however, you are left with uncertainty about whether or not the day was really saved by the end of the film.

Pan's Labyrinth brings us face to face with a brutish evil in the form of fascist Spain during WW2, which includes gory scenes of repression, torture, and war which I think I could have done without.

In short, some scenes in Pan's Labyrinth are certainly a feast for the eyes like other fantasy movies, but that feast is stripped away quicker than facial skin off a chemical peel when the girl comes back to reality. Switching between the fantasy and reality did nothing for me, and at the end left the story in doubt. Cruelty exists, and did the heroine prevail? Serious doubts were left in my mind. Watch it if you don't have to pay. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-16-chistmas-mixes-something-for-everyone/Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-16-chistmas-mixes-something-for-everyone/Been relaxing after a Christmas party on Friday, chilling and listening to DJ Riko’s Mixmas 2006 to get us into a holiday spirit. Also of note: djBC’s Santastic project and, to sound out the ‘bah humbug’ in each and every one of us, Appropriate Christmas.Been relaxing after a Christmas party on Friday, chilling and listening to DJ Riko’s Mixmas 2006 to get us into a holiday spirit. Also of note: djBC’s Santastic project and, to sound out the ‘bah humbug’ in each and every one of us, Appropriate Christmas.

A resurgent Russia will not be a recycled Soviet Union, either in terms of messianic ideology or territorial conquests. The Cold War as such will not return. But make no mistake: This renewed Russia will be strong, assertive and probably increasingly undemocratic. Its human rights record will not be pleasant, and it will definitely not be a consistent or reliable partner of the West. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-08-manifestos-all-shapes-and-sizes/Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-12-08-manifestos-all-shapes-and-sizes/Hugh over at Gaping Void has posted a challenge to create manifestos in 500 words or less. Of the many interesting results, I especially liked the Ex-pat Manifesto, part of which I’ve posted here: I live here because I want to. Just because I could be paid better for the same job back home does not give me the right to complain about it. In fact, just because anything at all is different here, I do not have the right to be rude about those whose country it really is (’the locals’).Hugh over at Gaping Void has posted a challenge to create manifestos in 500 words or less. Of the many interesting results, I especially liked the Ex-pat Manifesto, part of which I’ve posted here:

1. I live here because I want to. Just because I could be paid better for the same job back home does not give me the right to complain about it. In fact, just because anything at all is different here, I do not have the right to be rude about those whose country it really is (’the locals’).

2. Having infinite patience means it goes on forever, or, no matter how long those effing Spaniards (insert other expletive/nationality as appropriate) take to process a form or fix the plumbing, I’m the only one that cares if I loose my patience.

3. Even if I am conned, robbed, humiliated, lonely or homesick, it is worth remembering afterwards that I decided to step out of my comfort zone in the first place.

4. It really doesn’t matter if I hang out with the locals or with other ex-pats, as long as I am happy…

5. But those who continually complain about their new surroundings are to be avoided. It’s contagious.

6. Wow, everything is… new… it’s not the same as where I came from! What a chance to stimulate my senses! I will take photographs, maybe write a blog or keep a diary, produce podcasts, videos - I’m enjoying the fact that my new point of view is necessarily different, I’m revelling in these new opportunities to feel creative!

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Akaza Research, the company that develops this project. It's also worth pointing out that this blog is my personal space, and does not always reflect the official policies of that company. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-10-25-dont-be-a-douche/Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-10-25-dont-be-a-douche/This piracy PSA from Jack Black is Funny with a capital F.This piracy PSA from Jack Black is Funny with a capital F.

I remembered hearing this tune before, and sure enough, Philip Greenspun ran a usability analysis in his class on Friendster in 2003. Compare and contrast:

Matthew Drake, 2003: “The site is unbelievably slow, and this is a huge usability problem in my mind. Page load times are between 30 seconds and a minute depending on the page. I could speed page loads up to five or ten seconds by turning off images”.

Amerson Li, 2003: “Server speed is rather slow. This must be because of the great number of hits on the server. Sometimes, after I’ve read/replied to a message, it still appears on “Home” as having been unread. Also, whilst approving a testimonial, sometimes it doesn’t move the testimonial into the “approved” section until I refresh about 5 mins later. These could be bugs?”

New York Times, 2006: “As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download”.

It’s also interesting to note what Greenspun recommends Friendster do at the end: “flush MySQL” and “flush Tomcat” since they are both too slow and, of course, replace it with Oracle: “photo.net has an ancient 4-CPU database server running at 400 MHz with an old version of Oracle and it still manages to handle some fairly heavy traffic (see http://www.photo.net/about-us for stats; the site gets 10 million requests per day).”

Since Philip wrote those words, of course, the 800-pound gorilla of photo sharing, Flickr, has come of age and happens to run MySQL. According to the attached case study, they can manage the server load, and then some, because they can intelligently manage the photos. Greenspun’s own brainchild, photo.net, on the other hand, has since shrunk to about 5 million page requests a day (still not too shabby, we could all use 5 million a day I think) and has ’niched’ themselves as being the site for people wanting to learn more about photography (citing that the average user of photo.net spends $2,000 per year on photographic equipment).

Ever been a part of something special? Something unique? Something groundbreaking? I was a part of something like that, when I read the following words off a webpage in spring of 2000:

“Our goal is to offer the world’s best computer science education, at an undergraduate level, to people who are currently unable to obtain it.”

Five years ago, Arsdigita University graduated its first and only class of 27 individuals. I was one of them. The program was the brainchild of Philip Greenspun, founder of Arsdigita Corporation, and was meant to be a new experiment in education, both online and in the classroom. Five years later, we've all split and gone our seperate ways, but the website it still up and serving the lectures and materials.

It's been a long road since then, but hey, it was a long road during too. What follows is a brief history of me, and my life, in Arsdigita University.

My Career: Pre-Arsdigita Days

I first found Philip Greenspun's site in Ukraine around 1999. I had just gotten a new computer and was able to start using things like the browser and email. I had used email for work for three years prior to that, but we only had a 386 laptop with command-line UUCP programs to connect, grab email and disconnect. In the world of the Web, I was a definitely a late bloomer.

It wasn't always this way; thanks to my father's career at IBM for thirty-odd years, we had a computer around the house since 1980. My first computer was an IBM PC jr (!!!), and I did pretty well in the computer math courses that were in high school that taught me Pascal. However, going into university I felt at the time that I wanted a well-rounded and liberal arts education. I majored in English, and switched ro russian after spending a year in St. Petersburg.

So, in a nutshell, I wandered off the math-and-hard-science road that most computer science majors take. I graudated, got a job, had many life-enriching experiences, but found out that I wanted a better career, something that I had some experience in. Returning to Texas in 1999, I wanted to go back to school and earn a second degree, this time in Computer Science.

The problem was, it would take four semesters. Wait, eight semesters. Well, maybe only six and a half semesters. Those were the answers that the undergraduate Computer Science department of the University of Texas kept telling me, anyway. Since the curriculum was a long list of courses based on prerequisites, I couldn't take many of them in parallel, and would have to go through the same chute-and-ladder route that all the college freshmen were taking, the route that usually takes four to five years to complete.

So, in the fall of 1999, I enrolled in a few courses and got a job. I was hopeful that something else would come along before I had to complete four more years of coursework, studying alongside students who were ten years younger than I was.

Luckily, I clicked back onto Philip's site in spring of 2000, and found a link stating "me and my friends are starting a new university." Intrigued, I clicked further.

The Future's So Bright...Well Not Really

I had read most of Philip's online book before 2000, and while I didn't absorb any of the SQL or Oracle tips at that time, I did absorb most of the stories about the creation of Arsdigita Corporation. The salaries, the attitude that Philip had about treating engineers, the sports car that was driven by the employee with the most referrals that month...well, it was all part and parcel of the spirit of the times, I guess. Spirit or not, it was intoxicating. So to hear that Philip was starting up his own university where a select few would learn everything about computer science from MIT lecturers in the space of eleven months and P.S. it's for free, well, heck, where do I sign up?

So, I filled out an online application. The application was pretty streamlined, compared with other online college applications I had filled out at the time, and after a while I got a message requesting an interview.

The first interview was with Rajeev and Luis, both Arsdigita employees who later went on to teach at the University. The interview was mostly problem-solving questions, and while they did not rely on a lot of math or stats, they did elicit how people work problems out. The second interview was a one-on-one phone conversation with the Man In the Black T-shirt Himself, Philip Greenspun. I remember gushing a little, since I had already read his book, seen his photos, and thought I grokked a lot about the geek wunderkind. Gushing a little? Okay, maybe I couldn't shut my trap. But the end result was that I got an email that said I was in, so my wife and I packed up everything and moved to Boston in August of 2000.

No Shorts Until Databases

Through all of the copy that was written before, during and after our time at Arsdigita University, only Michael Yoon hit the nail square on the head about living in Boston and going to Arsdigita University:

“To attend ArsDigita University, you didn’t have to pay tuition. (Of course, you did need enough money to live in Cambridge, MA for 10 1/2 months while attending classes full-time.)”

My wife and I had actually been shrewd enough to go ahead of time in July of 2000, and start to look at a few places before the big move. This was still in the last days of the Internet gold rush, and places were hard to get. We phoned everywhere, saw about ten places, and picked one in Beacon Hill. Others weren't so lucky, and many had to show up in August and grab an apartment over the phone, sight unseen.

Moved-in or not, things got underway at beginning of September, and we got to know the rest of our classmates, professors, and Arsdigita Foundation staff. We also got to settle into what we called the 'Ivory Basement'; a large, communal office that had all of our workstations, complete with Aeron chairs and free coffee, juice and soda.

The first month got everyone going; Mathematics for Computer Science was a course that combined calculus and linear algebra in four weeks. Every Sunday the exams were given out, which set the pace for the rest of the year. It turns out that taking classes at UT was not such a bad thing, since that allowed me to feel confident in the material..for about the first two weeks, anyway.

After the first course came Scheme and SICP, then Discrete Math, then How Computers Work. By then, those of us who were not from Massachusetts originally got to get a feel of the winter months, and one of the students wrote on the whiteboards, 'No shorts until Databases', referring of course to our Database class in June. We also got used to a couple of odd things that were taking place around us:

We would see Philip rarely, if at all. This did not seem like a bad thing at the time, since we all knew that Philip was a busy CEO of a company that had just gotten funding from venture capitalists. More on this later.

We did not expect to be alone in the Ivory Basement, but that was how it turned out. Arsdigita was actually renting the entire basement and first floor of a building in downtown Cambridge, with the expectation that Arsdigita Corporation workers would soon be joining us after they outgrew their lavish digs on Prospect Street. They never showed up.

There was no sink, and no bathroom to speak of. A water main got cut off during construction, we were told, and so the entire basement didn't really have plumbing. We were content to use the bathroom on the first floor, but in an office with free drinks and no place to pour out the old drinks...well, you get the idea. Several of us volunteered to carry up a vase that quickly became the 'spitoon' of the office, to empty up on the first floor.

Christmas came and went, as did the Java class during the month of January. Algorithms was next, which was a tough month for many of us. March would be the Systems course, and then April would be Philip's own Software Engineering for the Web course, which many of us had come specifically to attend. So far, things were good.

March, then April

howl at your display
super Seth mojo is on
you've no where to hide

Quake players can't hide
from the burning gaze of Shai
grade rune: incomplete

I won't try to hide it. For the Systems course, I got a big fat C. Part of this was due to my huge Quake addiction, which the haikus above can attest to. Professor Luis, to his credit, did a fine job with the Systems course. However, it was also a rough month for a number of reasons.

People had been generally upbeat for most of the time at Arsdigita University because we were in a free and easy academic environment. Nobody had really asked too many harsh questions of the leadership like Will this program actually be certified and How will future years of the program be different and How will the Foundation pay for the next year of the program because we were busy studying and enjoying the time spent learning. Most of us chalked that up to the work of the Arsdigita Foundation staff, who had been working in the very next office next to the Ivory Basement.

The straw that broke that camel's back apparently was our not being invited to the Arsdigita Pi Day, on March 14th. I didn't really care, but apparently there was free food and a chance to socialize with the Arsdigita Corp workers, which we didn't often get to do. Some people were a little miffed, going so far as to say that they just don't think anything of us over there.

A few days later, all the Arsdigita Foundation staff were let go. So I guess somebody over there thought something of us after all. We had an all-hands meeting with Tracey Adams and got her to at least agree that everyone would finish this year. By the end of the month, Arsdigita had announced to the rest of the world that their funding was cut and that there would be no second class.

It also sunk in that Arsdigita University's program would never be certified as an official degree, and we would all have to find jobs in July, in the middle of the tech bust, with a certificate that was interesting but meant nothing.

This was the kind of funk that Philip Greenspun came to in April to teach his course.

Software Engineering for the Web, Kind Of

Before April 2001, we had been talking about Philip's course, and a few general statements had been made about it that we thought we knew for certain. Design superstar Edward Tufte was supposed to come visit. The course was based on the all-Linux courses that Philip had been teaching in the past. The course was based on Philip's glossy book which everyone had read and knew very well.

Well, one of the above sentences was true anyway.

At the end of March, we were told that thirty-two Microsoft computers were on their way to our campus, and that the course would have a .NET component. We had been faithfully working away on Linux boxen all this time, and hadn't been near a Windows product in the lab since we began in September. Oh yes, and no Edward Tufte.

We got the Dell boxen right on time for the course, and after a marathon session of cutting and crimping, set up a second network on top of the first, so that we had wireless Linux and a wired Windows 2000 box on each desk. Then, the hacking began.

Philip wanted to teach out of a new book he was writing at the time called Software Internet Engineering Workbook. We formed teams and were all given a choice to pick any platform we wanted to work on. Four teams picked the .NET platform, since it was provided by Microsoft free of charge for us to use. Microsoft also supported several new TAs to come to the class and help us learn the new technology.

Many of us, however, stuck with Linux and picked one of several technology stacks. Many chose the tried and true stack of Oracle + Tcl + Aolserver, which had been taught in previous courses. One team in particular chose to work on Postgres + Ruby + Apache, and produced something that looked a lot like Ruby on Rails. I was in a team that chose to use Postgres + Python + Aolserver. Only one team chose the J2EE + Tomcat + Linux stack, and if I knew then what I knew now (that is, I would be architecting large OSS projects in J2EE/Java EE for Akaza Research) that would have been the platform I would have chosen too.

In the end, it was much like any project; we were overworked, the client wanted more, and we worked up until the last hour to get the project done. It was a great experience, even with all the last minute changes and new curriculum. The presentation day came, but Philip was not there to judge our final products. We found this annoying but took it in stride, more or less. What we didn't know was that on presentation day, Philip was being deposed in the case of Greenspun v. Shaheen in Delaware.

Many of you who are reading this far have probably already read Philip's From Start-up to Bust-up, Eve Andersson's Diary of a Start-up, and Michael Yoon's Arsdigita: An Alternate Perspective. What's more interesting reading are all the court documents for the Greenspun v. Shaheen case, which were posted to this site during the trial. The redacted statements of the plaintiffs are surreal, and the creation of the Foundation seems to figure significantly in the document, even though most of the details were removed.

Even working with Philip during the month of April, we didn't get to see a lot of him, or hear a lot about the case. Many of us followed the entire affair online, just like the rest of the planet. Together with the rest of you, we also found a blank screen at Philip's site one day, telling us that he had settled amicably with Arsdigita Corp but could never comment on it again.

The rest of the year seemed to flash by after the end of April. The high point academically after that was a week that we spent with Patrick Winston from the AI lab, which was a real boost for most of us. Aside from lecturing in the morning, he took some time in the afternoon to reflect on the AI 'business of software' and was very enlightening. I started interviewing in some places, but nothing concrete ever materialized. None of us had any illusions about working for Arsdigita Corp after the end of the program.

And so, on the 15th of July 2001, thirty-two people came together and were awarded certificates of participation in Arsdigita University, all signed by Shai Simonson. Philip was there, as was Eve and Alex. The last time I talked with Philip was later that summer when he was working for Orange. As everyone knows, Arsdigita Corporation shuttered its doors about six months later when it was sold to Red Hat in February 2002.

As far as I know, no one rented the Ivory Basement after we moved out. That bit about no running water probably had something to do with it.

Where We've Been, What We're Doing

Since then, we all went our seperate ways and did seperate things. Some of us had kids. Some of us cut an album. (Some of us even had both the kid and the album.) Many of us moved back to where we came from and many of us got jobs in new places and moved there instead.

At the beginning of this year, I asked around and compiled a short list of past, current and future employers of Arsdigita University alumni. They are the following:

The International Finance Corporation
The Inter-American Development Bank
IBM
Financialcampus.com
Akaza Research
Speechworks (now Scansoft, er, Nuance)
Voxiva, Inc.
GCAS, Inc.
Ineoquest Technologies
Latham and Watkins
GVPi
Internews
The New York Times
Reed College
Bentley College
Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Our TAs also went on to get jobs in the following firms:

Bluefin Robotics
Breakaway Imaging
Permabit
Wikipedia

We also went back to school, believe it or not. Arsdigita alumni have gone on to study at the following places:

Bentley College's MS in Information Technology program
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
Tufts University's MS in Computer Science program
Yale University's Social Robotics Lab
NYU School of Law
University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business
University of Michigan's MS in Information

A Not-so-brief Note of Thanks

If you're read this far down, you're really dedicated and I owe you a beer or something. This has not tried to be a scandalous tell-all about life in the VC-controlled Arsdigita Corporation, nor has it tried to be a starry-eyed memoriam to Arsdigita University. We worked hard, we went on to get jobs, and in many ways the University helped us in our next careers.

We all have Philip Greenspun to thank for that. Philip generated a spectacular idea that propelled the idea of online education forward for the entire Internet. Let me explain that last sentence a bit.

MIT did not create OpenCourseWare until Arsdigita University completed its second month. Other universities followed suit by creating their own program that provided content online, and now it's hard to find a university without a alternate-learning/distance-learning program on the Internet today. Even a social-science institution like the Fletcher School now has the GMAP program, intended to reach a global audience and allow for them to meet twice a year and learn in their own countries the rest of the time.

Since Arsdigita, other universities have elected to create computer science programs for degreed students that are intensive in nature, like the Arsdigita experience; Southern Methodist University's Guildhall 18-month program comes to mind. Few or none of these programs were around, or they were not of the quality that Arsdigita proposed to us five years ago. (None of these, however, have been for free. Arsdigita University is still unique in that sense.)

What Philip imagined, ADUni Director Shai Simonson put into place and made it run. I think everyone at the University will agree with me that we owe Shai a deep, deep debt of gratitude for keeping the University running, even after the Foundation staff were sacked and the University was threatened with early closure.

We also have each other to thank. The only reason we didn't crash and burn as an entire class was because we were able to work together as a team, and study in an intense environment for ten and a half months. We made Philip's dream a reality just as much as Philip or Shai did. In the graudate programs I have been in since ADUni, a lot of the students have had their eyes on the prize of a certified piece of paper, and have been more interested in furthering their own academic records than helping each other solve the vexing problems of coursework and computer science and learn something. if we had graduated and all started a company together in 2001, it would have been great fun.

In my current job at Akaza Research, I sit about a block and a half away from the site of ADUni. If you never had an Internet connection, you would never know that Arsdigita Corporation ever existed--the HQ is now a permenant wing of Cambridge College, and as I mentioned before, the basement has been vacant ever since 2001. The lectures we videotaped, however, and have been downloaded and enjoyed for the entire time since then, and have served as a lasting resource for the public Internet.

This post has turned from a short article into a personal history, but I think it captures a little bit of the spirit and challenge of ADUni. I also hope that this gives future employers an idea of what the entire experience was about. Sometimes, I miss it a little. Then I remember that we had to work on Sundays, and I still miss it.

In short, thanks for everything. It was great fun.

Originally posted on July 3, 2006.

They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to “figure out how to make it work.” The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy ? and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. “You?re smart people. Find a way!” This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth.

Advice during a commencement speech comes in all shapes and sizes, but there was one piece of advice I was just reading about from Thomas Siebel's commencement speech that I thought was appropriate to share:

First thing, you need to get a job. How do you do that? I guess there are a couple of ways. A common route is to get as many interviews as you can, until someone offers you a job. And then you take it and make the best of it. I do not recommend that route.

My suggestion to you is that you find an industry that you find interesting. Say biotech. Or travel. Perhaps entertainment. Communications. Aerospace. Automotives. Within that industry identify a high quality company that you would like to work for. Located in a place that you would like to live.

And then get hired there. Learn everything you can about the company. Study it on the Internet. Read its annual reports. Become an expert. And then figure out how to get a job there. Any job. It doesn’t matter.

Write the CEO. Write the VP of Engineering.

Get yourself an interview and explain that you want to work for that company – no other company – and you are willing to take any job to get started.

Get a job in the mailroom. The help desk. The front desk. Customer service. Don?t worry about the salary or the title. Just get a job. After you get in the door, then the rest is up to you. Make it happen.

This reminds me of some similar advice I got on how to get into a new industry from a Fletcher grad, who simply put it as "Any door, any floor." While I have not done exactly this, it makes exact sense, and I am keeping this thought in the back of my head when I graduate this weekend. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-04-18-chernobyl-20-years-later/Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-04-18-chernobyl-20-years-later/We are coming up on the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl. Kiev native Neeka went looking around already and found Pripyat.com (english here), which was the closest city to Chernobyl. The photos are chilling and heartbreaking, to say the very least.We are coming up on the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl. Kiev native Neeka went looking around already and found Pripyat.com (english here), which was the closest city to Chernobyl. The photos are chilling and heartbreaking, to say the very least. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-04-08-meme-to-go-around/Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2006/2006-04-08-meme-to-go-around/Taken from Jeffrey Radcliffe; search on Wikipedia with your birthday,(just the month and day) and report three events, births, and deaths, including the year. Here goes nothing: EVENTS 1898 - The Goodyear tire company is founded. 1991 - Supreme Soviet suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party. 2005 - Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana (especially the Mississippi Gulf Coast) to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,604 and costing over 75 billion dollars in damage.Taken from Jeffrey Radcliffe; search on Wikipedia with your birthday,(just the month and day) and report three events, births, and deaths, including the year. Here goes nothing:

EVENTS

1898 - The Goodyear tire company is founded.
1991 - Supreme Soviet suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party.
2005 - Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana (especially the Mississippi Gulf Coast) to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,604 and costing over 75 billion dollars in damage.

BIRTHS

1936 - John McCain, American politician
1958 - Michael Jackson, American singer and songwriter
1969 - Me’Shell NdegéOcello, American singer

DEATHS

1877 - Brigham Young, American religious leader and western settler
1968 - Ulysses S. Grant III, American soldier and planner
1982 - Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress

On the Java front, has anyone done anything with Tagonist? Hah? Anyone?

I searched again on Christmas and found, much to my surprise, not only that Kathy finally got her own website and released a new album, but that Dead Dog’s Eyeball could be bought directly from her. I didn’t make the connection that it was actually a re-release with new tracks until I got it in the mail two weeks later.

What can I tell you–the album is pure bliss. It is a musical part of Austin Texas which we’ll probably never see again. This review says it all:

"I just knew he was a genius," K. McCarty says in Gina Arnorld's (sic) essay inside the cover of Dead Dog's Eyeball, and Kurt Cobain might have agreed, and the people at Homestead and Atlantic and Paul Leary must have agreed, and fifty million fans can't be wrong, but some of us didn't hear it. We couldn't listen past the surface noise, the cruddy sound, the cruddier instrumentation, the whiny and offkey singing, the infantilism: "I am a baby (in my universe)," he explains in one song, and no kidding. Were we, new-wavers turned nine-to-fivers, missing out, or were the hipsters deluding themselves into seeing something imperial in Johnston's big, crazy nakedness? That's why K. McCarty's work was so welcome and so valuable. It rendered Daniel Johnston's music listenable for the rest of us, it made his songs available to people who wouldn't have gotten it--the joke, the genius--who maybe couldn't enter the microcosm, the alternative universe, in which this music was formed...

Okay, so here’s what you have to do: 1. Go to Kathy’s website. 2. Buy both of her albums. 3. Listen and enjoy. 4. Repeat step 3.

Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).

Also entertaining was Alison Gopnik, who got downright recursive about the question:

It may not be good to encourage scientists to articulate dangerous ideas.

Take, for example, my most recent course, Algorithms, or COMP 160, over at Tufts University. For our project, the professor allowed us to program in Java, but put us on the measured mile; no objects of any kind were to be used to implement the algorithms. No Integers. No Stacks. No LinkedLists. I thought it would be a piece of cake and fired up Eclipse, ready to take on the problem.

Short story shorter, it wasn't a piece of cake, especially when I had to keep track of arrays in Java without the help of the Collections interface. I sweated a bullet or two, but with the help of an extension, got the project in under the wire and passed the course.

For the record, I don't think Tufts has embraced the Java Shift that you write about. I don't think they ever will. Also, those of us who are suspicious of things that are easy to use will always dig a little deeper and try other things besides just Java. Perl and C, for example. If I didn't want to dig deeper, I would have never taken COMP 160 to begin with, or even applied for the MS program at Tufts.

What's my point? Not all Java is dumb, and not all academic programs in the US are dumbing down.

PS--Couldn't help but drool a bit when I saw your new Software Management Training Program. Absolutely right of you to not trust MBAs right off the bat, since we all know a Fletcher degree is far superior. (Note to everyone: let the flaming begin...) ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-29-skillz-what-pay-the-billz/Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-29-skillz-what-pay-the-billz/Just had a read through of Computerworld's what tech skills are hot for 2006, and was glad to see that developers, as well as project managers, are in demand. Having both developed and managed, it's good to see that my skill set isn't quite being put out to pasture just yet. More interesting than the actual story was the claim that we aren't exporting as many jobs as we think: "Just had a read through of Computerworld's what tech skills are hot for 2006, and was glad to see that developers, as well as project managers, are in demand. Having both developed and managed, it's good to see that my skill set isn't quite being put out to pasture just yet.

More interesting than the actual story was the claim that we aren't exporting as many jobs as we think: "most of the stuff that's going offshore are low-level coding jobs", says one researcher from Forrester Research.

It's too bad the quote from Forrester is superficial and doesn't spell out how many low-level computing jobs have gone overseas. It also doesn't spell out whether that is just the case for this year, or several years running.

I'm sure the situation here is more like the following: low-level computing jobs got exported the most in 2005 because a) we had already exported enough jobs to India and they aren't able to keep up with demand any more, and b) with time we are starting to outsource to rural America, and not abroad.

PS -- Checked the links at the bottom and was pleasantly surprised that Computerworld is not exploring the blogging scene. This post is worth a read, if only because they are quoting Tufts students in the article: Women, IT and the C-word. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-23-merry-christmas-now-get-back-to-work-part-2/Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-23-merry-christmas-now-get-back-to-work-part-2/Wow, two posts in two days, that's quite a lot for me. If I keep this up, I bet I can publish a serialized version of how the Java-coding grinch stole Christmas. But seriously, I am proud to announce the 1.0 release of OpenClinica, an open-source clinical information management application written in J2EE and using the Postgres relational database. This is a lot of the reason why this blog has been silent for the last half of this year.Wow, two posts in two days, that's quite a lot for me. If I keep this up, I bet I can publish a serialized version of how the Java-coding grinch stole Christmas.

But seriously, I am proud to announce the 1.0 release of OpenClinica, an open-source clinical information management application written in J2EE and using the Postgres relational database. This is a lot of the reason why this blog has been silent for the last half of this year. Well, this and that. And some of this.

Anyway, a link to the download is here, check it out if you're in the bioinformatics space since it is free software, anyway. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-22-merry-christmas-now-get-back-to-work/Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-22-merry-christmas-now-get-back-to-work/I've been busy, and this blog has been collecting digital dust just sitting around. I have discovered Google Analytics, however, so I have been faithfully tracking just how unread my blog has been. As I coded in Java over the past three years, I never really embraced the EJB style of web applications, thinking that it was a bunch of over-complexified waddle; Bruce Eckel's article The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts vindicates my opinion of EJB.I've been busy, and this blog has been collecting digital dust just sitting around. I have discovered Google Analytics, however, so I have been faithfully tracking just how unread my blog has been.

As I coded in Java over the past three years, I never really embraced the EJB style of web applications, thinking that it was a bunch of over-complexified waddle; Bruce Eckel's article The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts vindicates my opinion of EJB. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-03-new-music-from-tinctoris/Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-12-03-new-music-from-tinctoris/Just a quick link to let everyone know that a) I’m still alive, and b) that Jeffrey Radcliffe, whom I reviewed earlier, is coming out with the Agricultural Revelations EP this month. I will post a review sometime soon. Also, just a quick shout out to everyone who has a geek on their christmas list to check out the Caffeinator–they are a cracklin’ good candy bar and I hope they get sold in smaller packages some time soon.Just a quick link to let everyone know that a) I’m still alive, and b) that Jeffrey Radcliffe, whom I reviewed earlier, is coming out with the Agricultural Revelations EP this month. I will post a review sometime soon.

Also, just a quick shout out to everyone who has a geek on their christmas list to check out the Caffeinator–they are a cracklin’ good candy bar and I hope they get sold in smaller packages some time soon.

Something that other Java blogs have pointed out is that Java is riding the crest of a wave, and after 10 years, people are wondering when Java will officially 'peak' and begin to get its market share eaten up by someone else; look at Jayson's recent post about the Innovator's Dilemma; now that we're at the top of the mountain, where do we go? And who is climbing that mountain behind us? Jayson (and a lot of people along with him) seem to think Ruby on Rails is waiting to take over where Java is starting to lag.

JDJ's own Joseph Ottinger once stated in an editorial that we, the Java community, are suffering from too much innovation; he had to make an embarrassing about-face in the next issue of JDJ and state, for the record, that there's still some innovation left for Java, and that we will need to keep growing and designing products that are, at the very least, easier to use for the general developer community.

With that in mind, is Sun and the Java community in general simply giving away their market share? Have we innovated to the point of maximum complexity, where we are nothing but code beaureucrats, impressing our friends with framework X and package Y?

Take, for example, the ServiceMix code package, which bills itself as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which implements the Java Business Integration (JBI) specs, linked to from ShareMe LLC: ServiceMix currently has the following JBI components:
Service components

\* Rules based routing via the Drools rule engine.
\* BPEL support for WS-BPEL via PXE
\* Cache for caching service invocations using a Map cache or a JCache provider
\* Groovy for clean integration with the Groovy scripting language as a component, transformer or expression language
\* JCA allows the Java Connector Architecture to be used for efficient thread pooling, transaction handling and consumption on JMS or other Resource Adapters
\* Quartz to support enterprise timer integration via the Quartz library
\* Scripting support to allow any JSR 223 compliant scripting engine to be used to easily create a component, perform a transformation or be an expression language.
\* Transformation using XSLT
\* Validation for schema validation of documents using JAXP 1.3 and XMLSchema or RelaxNG
\* XSQL for working with SQL and XML via Oracle's XSQL library



How many people think this is too much innovation? Too little? Too much innovation in one direction only? ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-09-02-katrina-disaster-assistance-links/Fri, 02 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-09-02-katrina-disaster-assistance-links/If you haven't donated already, here are some quick links to donate on the web: Yahoo has opened a store to donate to the Red Cross. Paypal has opened an account to donate to the United Way. And eBay is linking to MissionFish where you can buy things for hurricane victims.If you haven't donated already, here are some quick links to donate on the web:

Yahoo has opened a store to donate to the Red Cross.

Paypal has opened an account to donate to the United Way.

And eBay is linking to MissionFish where you can buy things for hurricane victims. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-09-01-katrina-heroism/Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-09-01-katrina-heroism/Everyone needs to check out the DirectNIC blog of Michael, the crisis manager who stayed through the hurricane and is now defending the DirectNIC servers against looters in New Orleans. Photos and a webcam link are also available.Everyone needs to check out the DirectNIC blog of Michael, the crisis manager who stayed through the hurricane and is now defending the DirectNIC servers against looters in New Orleans. Photos and a webcam link are also available. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-08-30-hurricane-katrina-map/Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-08-30-hurricane-katrina-map/With the news about Katrina coming ashore and the devastation reported in the city of New Orleans, the media has been clamoring for a map that can accurately describe the cost of the storm, not only in terms of destruction to the state but to the US energy situation. This map, found through Agonist, does the trick.With the news about Katrina coming ashore and the devastation reported in the city of New Orleans, the media has been clamoring for a map that can accurately describe the cost of the storm, not only in terms of destruction to the state but to the US energy situation.

This map, found through Agonist, does the trick. ]]>https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-08-23-recommended-highly-recommended/Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000https://tomhickerson.com/en/archives/en/2005/2005-08-23-recommended-highly-recommended/Got to post this while I'm thinking of it: McSweeney's Recommends is a collection of things, each one not related to another, not in the least: The Man Without a Past We may be on a Scandinavian kick (see Show Me Love, below). Probably not. But this is a good flick. It’s Finnish, being the second of a trilogy by Aki Kaurismäki. We laughed. Interesting soundtrack too, strangely enough. Hot tea with honey Any type will do, but what you have is a spoon, some honey, and hot tea.Got to post this while I'm thinking of it: McSweeney's Recommends is a collection of things, each one not related to another, not in the least:

The Man Without a Past
We may be on a Scandinavian kick (see Show Me Love, below). Probably not. But this is a good flick. It’s Finnish, being the second of a trilogy by Aki Kaurismäki. We laughed. Interesting soundtrack too, strangely enough.

Hot tea with honey
Any type will do, but what you have is a spoon, some honey, and hot tea. The real deal is, it’s a double delight: not just that honey is a fine, fine additive, but that the spoon used to stir the honey is removed with the slightest layer of residual sugar, and that Darjeeling-basted sweetness is pert near joyous. And that thing about local honey being good for allergies? Seems legit.

Small pads of paper, maybe 4 inches by 4 inches
Lots of times, there are things we want to write down. These do the trick.

Not moving
Because have you ever had to pack your stuff? As if there were ever a more obvious recommendation. We’re embarrassed we had to say it.

That having been said, I feel the urge to jump into a review of Jeffrey Radcliffe’s first album, Travelog. Jeffrey is a good friend, and I know him as being no stranger to travel. He left Oregon to join me and 34 other students at ArsDigita University when the hi-tech economy was already starting to turn dicey in 2000. He originally hails from my home state of Texas, but has been able to travel to Europe, Australia and other continents unknown.

So yes, you can listen to the album and say that it is based on an inspiration bourne from traveling the globe. However, the mind’s eye paints a different picture every time you slip the album into your player and press play–there are notes that you didn’t notice the last time you listened, there is a mood in one song you didn’t pick up on–and you begin to get the feeling that Travelog is more about the travel of the mind, not the body.

Take, for example, Lament, the last track of the album. Beneath the refrain, as you hear the song a second or third time, you begin to hear new sounds in the background you didn’t notice before. I need better speakers, you might say to yourself as you hear a rumbling noise, then a whispering hiss, much like sand being thrown against a windshield. But as you listen to it again, you begin to discover for yourself that it’s not you, and that Jeffrey’s sound is skillfully wrought to play with the listener. Listening to this album, you begin to wonder where he was when the breath of inspiration whispered into his ear each of these tracks.

What makes this album even more special is that it is distributed by a site that caters to local artists, CDBaby. If you feel the open-source love like I do and want to support local artists who don’t have record deals with BMI and are still talented anyway, buy this album. (You can sample some of Jeffrey’s other work here for free.) A special shout-out to Massachusetts people, if you thought ’local electronica’ was an oxymoron, you are sadly mistaken. Buy this album.

This distribution is a beta release and is not intended for creating production-level applications.

If it’s still beta, why give it a 1.0 label and start work on a 2.0 release?

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly.

No big surprise here. Japan is moving ahead of the US in broadband deployment. However, Japan had better learn from its Korean neighbors, who deployed broadband like crazy, if the graph is true to life. However, they overextended and many of the Korean telcos are now reorganized under bankruptcy.

In the class, we came up with nine ways to explain prosperity in developing countries:

1. Macroeconomic: structural incentives should be put in place by the government, everything else will follow. Stabilize, Privatize, Democratize, and Liberalize. See Jeffrey Sachs, Dani Rodrik.

2. Microeconomic: firms compete, not nations. See Michael Fairbanks, Michael Porter.

3. Institutional Domain: rule of law and social welfare leads to predictable behavior.

4. Natural Capitalism: all investments and development should be made with future prosperity in mind. See L. Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken.

5. Cultural School: culture matters, and a cultural heritage can make you progress-prone or progress-resistant. See Harrison’s Culture Matters.

6. Knowledge School: individuals should be in pursuit of closing the ‘idea gap’. See Stiglitz and Romer.

7.Comparitive Advantage: all wealth is based on finite resources, and some countries can manage their resources better than others. See Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus.

8. Human Capital: all knowledge has legs, the only investment worth caring about is ourselves. See Gary S. Becker, and a nod to Nordstrom and Ridderstrale’s Funky Business and Karaoke Capitalism.

9. Evolution: survival only belongs to the fittest. See Thomas Seoul and Jared Diamond.

In this list, there are specialists who concentrate in one field, maybe two, maybe three. But what if a specialist can diversify and analyse developing countries from all nine different points of view? In the lecture, Fairbanks points to a place like the Fletcher School as a place with an ability to train diverse enough scholars/practitioners able to analyse on many levels; places like the Kennedy School all subscribe to Sachs’ point of view, and other schools like Columbia’s SIPA and Johns Hopkins’ SAIS can’t do much better than that.

Maybe I’m wrong, but seeing all the economic theories up on a wall is fascinating in and of itself. Fairbanks is big on fascination, and with it, he captures attention. At least for a short while.

The other day I saw this on craigslist, and was pretty floored by the job description:

_

We’re a small Marketing company that has been in the Boston area for twenty years and we’re looking for a new team member to help us expand our web presence. We’re looking for either a PHP expert or a knowledgeable JAVA J2EE developer who has experience with a variety of other Open Source technologies and an expert knowledge of web based technologies like Flash, Cold Fusion, and Oracle. A strong working knowledge of C++ would also be desirable.

The job is full-time. You’ll spend approximately 20 to 30 hours a week as a developer and the remainder of your time filling out other critical roles within the organization: mail room, running errands, answering phones, light cleaning, etc.

We are currently hoping to find someone with either a BS or a Masters in either Computer Science or Software Engineering. You should be able to produce a portfolio of your work and provide three or more references.

The position pays 25k a year and requires travel to Worcester once a month. You can expect full benefits … (etc.)

_

holy crap, dude.

I can’t wait to stand in line for this one. Does it include toilet-washing, together with the phone and mail duties? At least the company could have billed it as a part time job and spared some college kid the agony of answering the phone after getting a BSCS…but wow.

Is all respect for the IT profession just going out the windows or what?