The Leap Second
December 31, 2005 | Science
Jamie Zawinski brings us the important details you need to know about tonoght's leap second. Live it up, there's an extra second in our lives today!
(Very geeky) update: How the leap second propagated via the Network Time Protocol the keeps all the world's computers, probably including yours, in sync.
Steve Jobs Movie Posters
December 30, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Technology
The magic of Photoshop.
Linked lists
December 29, 2005 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
It's the end of the year, and plenty of people (thanks Jason) are generating "best of" links, jogging memory and generating smiles.
Culture hacking: Improv Everywhere ("We Cause Scenes") stations a tuxedoed bathroom attendant in the Times Square McDonalds, and records the action. Complete with annotated photographs, and a video clip.
One (more) reason to live in San Francisco: PARK(ing) – artists install a temporary, portable public park into a two-hour parking spot. Nobody thinks like this in Hanover, let me tell you. Well, maybe in Rio Blanco, but that's in Vermont, what would you expect? Plus, it's cold here half the year.
Theory of Democracy: Long Sunday checks in with an important post on the fundamental strength of Democracy ("...democracy institutionalizes conflict through the regular and periodical redistribution of power and permanent rules controlling contests."), and the tendencies that undermine it ("There is always a possbility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish [...] in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict"). C.f Cheney and Nixon.
I've been spending the week learning more programming, hence the (very) inside joke of this post's title.
Avoiding Errands to Do Real Work
December 24, 2005 | Life | People & Society
Paul Graham on good and bad procrastination:
Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
ECHELON
December 24, 2005 | Governance | People & Society
My friend Jon Husband reminded me that worldwide surveillance has been going on for years. You can read all about it. Grim.
Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch
December 23, 2005 | Life | Software | Technology
During the first week of December I traveled to rural Atlanta to attend the Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch.
The Ranch isn't a place, exactly – more like a concept. In the US, they rent an executive retreat lodge 1-2 weeks per month, where 18 students take single rooms in a relaxed natural setting with full-service meals. They hire top-notch instructors on chunky technical topics, and they geek out in a major way.
The day schedule was thus:
- Breakfast at 8:30 AM
- Class from 9:00 to 12:30 PM
- Lunch from 12:30 to 1:00
- Class from 1:00 to 2:30
- Execise/nature/photography walk outside from 2:30 to 3:00
- Class from 3:00 to 6:30
- Dinner from 6:30 to 7:00
- Hacking sessions in the lab from 7:00 PM to midnight or 1:00 AM. The lab is open 24 hours a day, and some people took good advantage of it. Here's the lab/classroom:
The attendees were diverse, except that we were all white males. Here's a photo:
One person from Germany, and one from the UK. Three US government/military employees – one who couldn't discuss what department he worked for (probably the NSA. At one point he asked, "Is there a way to open a socket to a specific IP and capture the stream to a database?"). Ages ranged from early '20s to early '60s. One person had extensive Lotus Notes programming experience, several had worked on large complex software for industry. Two people worked on Windows machines, the rest on Mac OSX. Several were Linux refugees. We had one O'Reilly author in the room. One person had been to the Ranch once before, another had been twice before. Keith Bingman and I brought up the rear on programming experience, but we didn't drown, and we both got a lot out of the full-immersion approach.
Cost: $3,500 plus a $400 plane ticket and $70 in airport parking. A significant investment, but worth it. I left my house on Sunday at 8:00 AM and returned home the following Friday at midnight.
Our instructor – Marcel Molina, Jr., one of the Rails core developers and a 37 Signals employee – deserves kudos and gratitude for organizing a course with no prerequisites that satisfied such a wide range of experience and understanding. Marcel knew the material completely, and had in-depth knowledge of the Unix shell, databases, Martin Fowler's computer science writings, typical practices and idioms, popular culture, and literary theory. We had a lot of fun banter ("Who is the best Rails programmer ever?"), witty techie asides ("TextMate has preferences?!?"), and deep recursive pedagogy (grokking the functional and unit testing framework while getting sidetracked by a bug in Rails that existed only for 18 hours – during which time we had grabbed our code snapshot – while learning the theory of testing in general).
I had the rare experience of focusing on a single topic for five days, virtually all day every day. A couple of students had solid Ruby or Rails knowledge and came to work on their applications outside of the interrupt-driven work environment. For them, the class segments were less important than the focus time and access to an expert for design and code assistance along the way.
I've written about Rails before, about a year ago ("Avoiding Software Fear"). In that post I wrote, "'New' technology becomes 'mainstream' technology through the momentum of use." Rails today has momentum of use, far more than when I first wrote about it last January. In the next six months I think people in the technical community will be saturated with Rails developments, from whizzy applications, to regular code updates, to new books.
In about six or eight hours of programming, I wrote a simple blog-style application. It has user login, posts, comments, human-readable URLs, time-stamping, and AJAX-based deleting. Remember, the last time I did any programming was in 1976. If you want to build web apps in the next few years, you could do a lot worse than pick a framework that assists programmer productivity. I have a lot to learn, but this was a great way to jump up the learning curve.
(Unintended?) Consequences of Surveillance
December 23, 2005 | Governance | People & Society
If your life is similar to mine, you may have been too busy these last few weeks of the business year to notice an important story brewing in the US capital. It's one worth reflecting on during the year-end break; here is a summary written in links.
Laura Rozen has a data point on the history of US government surveillance of its citizens. Read this excerpt from the final report of the United States Senate Elect Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976):
From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. ...
The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them.
FBI informants in the civil rights movement and reports from field offices kept the Bureau's headquarters informed of developments in the civil rights field. ...
The FBI's program to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement entailed attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press. ... The FBI sought to influence universities to withhold honorary degrees from Dr. King. Attempts were made to prevent the publication of articles favorable to Dr. King and to find "friendly" news sources that would print unfavorable articles. The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King's hotel rooms.
The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from its microphone coverage. According to the Chief of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division, the tape was intended to precipitate a separation between Dr. King and his wife in the belief that the separation would reduce Dr. King's stature. The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide. The FBI also made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited."
Now, compare to current US news stories:
- President Bush ordered an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States. He has no apologies.
- The numbers don't add up.
- Security analysts think new technology could be involved. Or that the NSA "may have compromised a hardware manufacturer -- say Motorola or a satellite phone manufacturer, a telecom carrier or a satellite(s)."
- A highly respected security expert wonders about the threat of unchecked Presidential power.
- John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, says Bush has committed an impeachable offense.
- 5% of the US population is illiterate. Does this mean that perhaps 20% or 30% of the population is literate but reads at, say, high-school level? If so, then:
- The bottom tier can't follow the complexity of the issues. For them, no terror alerts since the 2004 election.
- The top tier is too busy succeeding to pay attention. For them, nice year-end bonuses.
What would Bush have done to "neutralize" Martin Luther King, Jr.? Who are we neutralizing today?
Chaotic Growth
December 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Michael Arrington tackles the Web 2.0 definition:
Web 2.0 is not a marketing slogan. It is the slogan of a people’s army. Our army. They are words that help us explain the explosion of conversations on the web, and justify our enthusiasm for innovation. Web 2.0 is why I came back from my exodus at the fringes of technology, to explore the frontier of the new consumer web.
Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that something amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.
Dave Winer contrasts this with The Tim O'Reilly and John Batalle school of Web 2.0.
This One's For All You Writers Out There
December 23, 2005 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Doonesbury is bite-sized amusing today. Alex is writing her college application essay. Her dad looks on.
Plausible Story
December 18, 2005 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
My friend Hannah has an excellent new blog, called Plausible Story.
Recent news indicates that 1 in 20 Americans is illiterate in English, despite increasing college graduation rates. I suggest Americans might be innumerate as well – 1 in 20 is 5%, and if people understood that 5% of the country could not read or write simple English, we would have a good understanding of why the President can repeatedly and without apology break the law, and violate the constitution, and claim that he will continue to do so, while most people just go Shopping. Perhaps worth a comparison to other fascist and totalitarian propaganda efforts. Bonus link for extra credit reading.
The reason I bring all this up is that Hannah is highly literate, writes really well, and her blog's premise – "Where stories might even be true" – intersects nicely with the state of "news" today. Go take a look; if you like what you see, subscribe – and more importantly, leave a comment which will serve to encourage her! (FYI: It's a TypePad blog, and they've had some techical issues recently, in case you see odd behavior over there.)
