May 2013
5 posts
The One Thing
The first HTTP connection was made in November 1989 (Tim Berners-Lee had first proposed the idea in March of that year).
The idea of hypertext was also an active research area at the time. Look at the proceedings for the ACM Hypertext Conference 1989, and you will find a plethora of papers delving into what the structure of hypertext documents should be, how they should be used, how linking...
“I’ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such...”
– Jaron Lanier
Games as a hook into CS
From the same article I was talking about in my previous post, a fascinating look at how videogames are a hook into CS, but it’s not how much you play games, but how you play them, that affects whether it steers you towards CS:
Betsy DiSalvo (now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech) starts from an interesting observation. Many computer scientists (who are mostly white or Asian, and male)...
What do you think computer science is?
Via this article in the latest CACM, I came across the work of Mike Hewner, who studies CS education, in particular the issue of what students think the field is about.
Here are some (paraphrased) points from his dissertation that I found particularly interesting:
There were three main conceptions of CS among students (with the percentage that held it):
Programming is central, with...
Future programming
When lambdas make it into C++, it’s fair to say that the functional languages camp has “won”. A purely functional language may not have broken into the mainstream, but a large number of features that are functional in spirit are now part of almost every mainstream language. Hard core believers will grumble about macros, or other mechanisms that let you treat code as data to be...
April 2013
5 posts
Patterns of use
I find a clear pattern emerging in the way I use various computing devices.
Laptops and desktops—I put them in the same category because they are heavy, power hungry, and have full size keyboards—are factory machines. They are what I use to get serious work done, the kind that gives me a paycheck. I almost never reach for them outside work situations.
On the other end of the...
Abolish the "Save" icon
Aza Raskin on the ubiquitous “Save” icon :
It’s a floppy disk. There is only a tenuous connection between saving and a floppy disk even for those of us who know what a floppy is (and at the moment most of us remember them), but floppy disks are on their way to becoming as unknown as Charles Yerkes. Don’t know who I’m talking about? That’s my point.
Floppy disks were a...
RIP Ebert
Well, I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters. I loved the way Bob and Charlotte didn’t solve their problems, but felt a little better anyway. I loved the moment near the end when Bob runs after Charlotte and says something in her ear,...
“I’ve certainly experienced my share of cognitive dissonance when it comes to...”
– Don’t Worry That Your Job is Pointless, James Shakespeare.
March 2013
12 posts
Start here
I started writing here in 2008. And now when I look back, it pleasantly surprises me to see a body of work. But the reverse-chronological presentation of a blog is particularly hostile to new readers, or even regular readers looking for an overview.
So here they are, all the long-form posts from this blog, categorized as best as I can. Start here.
We are all Mad Men
For the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on what I loved about Mad Men. It wasn’t the acting or period accuracy or cinematography. There are plenty of shows that have those, but that never pull me in. Only after processing a run of five seasons in the lull until the sixth did I realize the true reason the show attracted me.
Mad Men is an honest portrayal of the themes of modern work in all...
Meetings are mutexes
A meeting is a big honkin’ mutex. Treat it like one.
explain why it’s needed
minimize the resources it locks
hold it for as short a time as possible
And then go about your work.
STEM jobs
Via Daniel Lemire’s blog, I came across this three-part series of posts by John F. McGowan that uses job posting data to analyze the STEM job market.
What is really hot in STEM jobs?
The Catch-22 STEM job market
What do STEM employers want?
The key results of this brief survey of the Craig’s List San Francisco Bay Area job board are: very few entry-level or junior STEM jobs are posted. Most...
Strong opinions, weakly held
It’s a lazy Sunday.
Strongly held
Weakly held
Strong opinions
Bigot
Wisdom
Weak opinions
Lemming
Spineless
“Fighting for continued existence is the biggest battle for a computer science...”
– About High School Computer Science Teachers, by Selena Decklemann.
Zero Knowledge
Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali will receive the 2012 ACM Turing Award for their work in cryptography.
I encountered Goldwasser’s work during a graduate course in cryptography. I came across the idea of zero knowledge proofs, which is a technique for Alice to prove possession of a secret to Bob without actually giving away the secret. At the end of their interaction, Bob will be...
Addicted to work
Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, writes about her all-consuming workaholism in the New York Times:
I didn’t start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I...
What I work on...
… is deep infrastructure backend stuff. It is one of Google’s secret sauces, and when someone asked me, I usually just said “cluster management”, which sounds as inspiring as a damp towel.
Now Cade Metz over at Wired has saved me (and a bunch of others, I’m sure) by managing to go a bit deeper into what that means, adding some color to The System That Shall Not Be...
Moving to Chrome OS
I knew I was ready for jump to ChromeOS because I was already spending most of my time on any computer in Chrome. Yes, it could even do things like ssh, which was all the escape from the browser I ever needed. I used my laptop as a 21st century dumb terminal. For heavy duty work coding, I had a heavy duty machine that I sat under my desk and was used remotely. For the rare occasion that I needed...
From the mouths of babes
A compendium of recent tweets:
“Son, in my time we wore eye glasses without computers in them.” “Dad, you talk funny.” #
“Son, in my time we had to go to another place and sit there for 8 hrs everyday to earn money.” “Dad, you talk funny.” #
“Son, in my time we learned logarithms and looked up logarithm tables to do complex...
February 2013
8 posts
Factory machines
I’ve been trying to figure out the place of the desktop computer in my computing universe. For the last five (or more?) years, I have not had one at home. I have one at work. It runs headless under my desk, and serves up ssh and X sessions. (By “desktops” I mean computers in immobile boxes, so that would include servers in datacenters too.)
I don’t see them completely going away. Very high-end...
The new luxury
Imagine, if, in today’s world, you saw someone jotting down notes in a meeting with a fine fountain pen. You know, the kind that has a cartridge filled with liquid ink, that flows through a metallic nib, sometimes covered with a fine coat of a precious metal. The kind that seems strikingly, anachronistically out of place in a conference room with laptops and white boards and dry erase markers and...
“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold...”
– Virginia Heffernan, April 2009, on a talk Bruce Sterling gave at SXSW that year.
Productivity isn't
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
– Bob Dylan.
Productivity has been on my mind (again) lately. I present some thoughts here, if only to get a load off my head.
Productivity is for peasants. Yes, that is a provocative framing, but the point stands: productivity is you being accountable to someone, and them measuring you by metrics they deem...
Colorful geometry
This geometry book from 1847 (!!) uses “colored diagrams and symbols instead of letters for the greater ease of learners.”
For example, consider this right-angled triangle…
… and two ways of stating facts about it.
The old way (quoting from the book):
The angle BAC, together with the angles BCA and ABC are equal to two right angles, or twice the angle ABC.
The angle CAB added to the angle...
Review: Close to the Machine
The opening pages, where two programmers are completing each others sentences as they try to find the root cause of a bug, is the lure that will immediately pull any programmer into this book. But as you journey into the book, you find someone who can plumb the depths of the pathos of this tribe of people. A literary Sherry Turkle, if you will. And as she does that, her sparklingly detailed...
Computer Science PhD trends
One of the most under-rated gems in professional computer science is the Taulbee Survey put out every year by the Computing Research Association. It is a treasure trove of statistics, hard data and trends about both the input (enrollment) and output (graduation and employment) of the computing education pipeline. The latest one has data for the 2011–2012 time period.
You could spend hours diving...
January 2013
19 posts
Tackling tail latency
This will be hard to miss as it is the cover story of the next Communications of the ACM, but here’s a shout out nevertheless to the article titled “The Tail at Scale” by Googlers Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso.
The abstract:
It is challenging for service providers to keep the tail of latency distribution short for interactive services as the size and complexity of the...
“But even if TextMate 2 drops from the sky fully-formed and marveled at by all,...”
– Perhaps my favorite Emacs quote of all time, by Kieran Healy, via @keithmantell.
Blue collar coders
There have been a couple of recent calls for blue collar coders and knowledge workers.
Anil Dash:
High schools have long offered vocational education, preparing graduates for practical careers by making them proficient in valuable technical skill sets which they can put to use directly in the job market right after graduation. Vocational-technical schools (vo-tech) provide trained workers in...
“I understand that anything I write now opens me up to criticism, contradiction...”
– Why I’m starting a blog, Jordan Burgess.
The void
My computing slab is in a cave. (Naturally, so am I. I wouldn’t send it in alone, would I?) No Wifi, no 3G. Then, when we come out into civilization (i.e. connectivity) after a few hours, the slab goes Bing! Bing! Bing! as it catches up to reality after being in the knowledge-less void, its notification bar lighting up like a Christmas Tree. “Look at all the things you missed!”,...
“Her writing was always voice and detail. I once sent her a piece I was trying to...”
– Tom Hanks, about Nora Ephron.
Engineering, Culture and Tools
As an engineer, I’ve always been flummoxed by the word “culture”, esepecially as it pertains to corporate entities, especially those of the tech variety.
When someone asks you, “What’s the culture like?”, or “Is this candidate a good culture fit?”, what do they mean, and how do you answer them? Phrases like “work hard, play harder”,...
“The word passion comes from Latin root pati-, meaning suffering, or enduring....”
– Get Rich Slowly, on passion.
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Review
I’ve been following Cal Newport’s writing for a long time. He’s a sensible, practical guy. And the career advice book he just wrote, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, is a sensible, practical book.
Which means it will probably take most people by surprise.
He starts by building the case for “follow your passion” being bad advice. Instead, one should focus on becoming really good at something...
“If we go back to Latin roots, we find ars, artis meaning “skill.” It...”
– Donald Knuth, in “The Art of Computer Programming”, on the etymology of the word “art”.
Scaling communication: email vs shared documents
Over the last couple of years, I have noticed a marked change in the way my colleagues and I communicate with each other at work. While still dominant, the use of email seems to have peaked, and folks are increasingly using shared Google docs to not just document a topic, but also to discuss options and arrive at a consensus. (Disclaimer: I’m biased, but take my opinion for what it’s worth.)
Part...
The rise of fimperative programming
I love functional programming just as much as the next guy, but I’m wary when someone unabashedly declares it the savior from our software crisis.
For the longest time, it was thought that functional programming would save us from the multicore crisis, because, well, if there is no shared state then every concurrent execution can just blaze ahead full speed, can’t it? But the devil really is in...
“The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.
The people who...”
– The Art of Being Still, by Silas House.
“It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone...”
– Zadie Smith, on the difference between pleasure and joy.
Grateful for technology?
Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. — Louis CK.
Does technology induce feelings of gratitude in you? Does it make you behave better? Do you ingest a life-enhancing (or life-saving) drug and then go about your daily snark? When your browser loads a webpage do you marvel at the straight line made through a stack of disparate but amazing technologies (silicon, displays, networks, Ethernet,...
“When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of...”
– Rules for Writing Fiction
December 2012
9 posts
Best of 2012
It has been another great year blogging, and I am deeply grateful for everyone who chose to spend some time with the words I put out, and even more so for those who started a conversation, either in the comments, or on their own online spaces.
In terms of hard-nosed numbers, the key statistic I’m pleased about is that RSS subscribers grew 3.3X over the course of this year.
These were the...
