Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sun, 02 Apr 2006 03:41:00 GMT
I must say, it’s amusing to see that the “human spam” article received 70+ comments, all but one of them spam.
And so, I tune the anti-spam settings in this blog, bow to the many lice-ridden vermin who littered this site with their repulsive, civilization-destroying botnets, and busy myself with the “nuke” button.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:06:00 GMT
It's fun to do things alone, but it's more fun with other folks, even when you're afraid they might laugh at you.
So.
There's an unfinished version of xdraw you can play with. It's at http://www.xdraw.org/xdhTest.html
It needs Firefox 1.5. I've tried it on Windows, OS X and Linux and it seems to work OK on all three, though Windows is perceptibly faster.
In the build as of today, grouping handles are broken, the polyline tool does exactly the same thing as the scribble tool, and the gradient tool is just a tease for a feature that hasn't been written yet. As I said on the dojo list, it's "pre-alpha".
Developer releases are coming in about a month, and I'm shooting for a formal 0.1 by May.
If you want to help, say so in the comments here and we'll figure something out.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:11:00 GMT
Recently, Jill and I were at what back in the Bubble might have been called a “networking event.”
Some very decent, successful old friends were in attendance, as were a strange mix of folks whom Jill christened “shucksters” as in an unholy mix of shyster and huckster. Or something to do with oysters. Anyway…
There was the successful purveyor of a well-known diet product, and several folks promoting email marketing, ad networks, and systems for bringing your notional Hollywood Blockbuster to Steven Spielberg’s attention.
I’ve been thinking a lot since then about human nature and the role of society. The idea that keeps bobbing up in the magic eight ball of my mind is “We’re all shucksters.”
We’re all shucksters. We would all send spam, and hawk pr0n, and phish the clueless, and Anderson our accounts, and misuse the powers of whatever office we could bribe our way into, if there weren’t any consequences.
If there weren’t any consequences.
But we’ve spend the last few millienia working out what the consequences should be, so the greatest number of us could live as well as possible with the minimum concern that we would be murdered in our sleep for our iPods.
To any reader of history, civilization is not a linear path. There are retrograde motions that make pre-Gallilean cosmology look positively mathematical. Even a vaguely open-minded search will detail our failings past and present.
Civilization is an artifact of designs that succeeded where others failed, in that fundamental objective, of providing the greatest good to the greatest number of individuals for the longest time.
You can be a major shuckster and edge out ahead of civilization for a time, exploiting fellow humans who haven’t clued into the dangers of running that free screen saver.
You can be a minor shuckster and gleefully pirate the works of living artists. You won’t get caught, probably. The artists won’t go broke because if it. Probably. But further along the path, the people who create things need to eat, and it’s a rare breed who wants three meals of fame alone each day.
Or you can realize that the moment ahead of the curve is not the little notch where a dictator builds his palace for a few decades before he’s garroted by his own starving people.
The moment ahead of the curve is in helping more people live better than they do now. It’s in joining a community that protects people rather than exploiting them.
It’s not in your nature as a solo human animal. It’s in your nature as a civilized human being.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:40:00 GMT
So, Jeffrey Zeldman posted today, complaining about Web 2.0 hype.
Who can blame him, really. I sat in the Web 2.0 conference last year. While it was fun to meet some of the recently and soon-to-be funded bright lights doing neat stuff right in your web browser, the VC crowd, beautiful and sharp, filled most sessions, seeking a score.
But Zeldman lumped in the damaging over-hype of the AJAX/Web 2.0 meme with what I would call a critical misjudgent about what Web 2.0 really is. Hey says,
“Wireframing AJAX is a bitch. The best our agency has come up with is the Chuck Jones approach: draw the key frames. Chuck Jones had an advantage: he knew what Bugs Bunny was going to do. We have to determine all the things a user might do, and wireframe the blessed moments of each possibility.”
To which I can only respond “welcome to my life.” My life being, in this case, that of an actual application software developer. Application users are not an “audience” that you can plan out a passive media consumption experience for. They’re using your software to accomplish a goal, to solve a point of personal pain, perhaps. I can’t imagine developers sitting around Microsoft going “what a pain in the ass it’s going to be creating a word processor for people… it’s like they could write anything!”
One of the things that makes Web 2.0 “different” is the idea of real software that runs well enough in your browser that the other applications you might use aren’t necessary, particularly when their connection to the Internet was implemented as an afterthought.
This is the sort of design that requires the kind of thinking taught in Alan Cooper’s “About Face”. It’s an entirely different discipline, and complaints that it’s difficult to wireframe for are simply off topic.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sun, 15 Jan 2006 05:12:00 GMT
At RubyConf I stood up and volunteered expertise I accumulated starting and running the Los Angeles Java Users' Group for the first seven or so years of its existence. If you're thinking of starting a group in your area, here are a few tips:It's really easy to mistake the fluid and personal-feeling communication tools available these days for real face-to-face time. Brains are amazing things, with machinery that has evolved specifically to help us communicate with each other in person. Don't miss out on it!
Get a bunch of people interested in the same thing together in a room, stir the pot with an interesting speaker or shared project, and then give folks a chance to talk informally with each other afterwards.
The rewards are immediate AND long term.
Sounds obvious, but these groups form around people using something, usually a technology. You'll need to go out and find people who are interested. For the LAJUG, I started out with co-workers and friends and my first meeting had... three people present, including me.
I spent the next month attending other meetings in the area -- multimedia design meetings, other programming groups -- and promoting the next LAJUG meeting. The second meeting had about twenty people, and afterwards there were usually at least that many, sometimes quite a few more.
A Regular Time and Place
LAJUG benefitted immensely from being held with great regularity on "The First Tuesday of the Month from 7:00 to 9:00 PM." The venue changed every couple of years (it met at Enfish, ISI, Hughes, Caltech, UCLA, Goto/Overture and now Sun), but it was pretty easy for attendees to mark their calendars with a recurring "LAJUG" event.
Settling into a regular time and place also helps make the group feel "stable" and attract assistance long-term
What became a running theme with LAJUG was a certain "open source" quality. Unknown to me, Michael Merle had attempted to create a Java users' group a few months before I did. However, he chose to have his first meeting at the venerable Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica. This required him to charge admission to pay for the facility. Paying, even a token amount to a worthy venue, added enough friction to that initial attempt that there was no ongoing group when I started the organization that still meets regularly today.
The best speakers come from within the local community. If you're active on the ruby lists and IRC you can probably find them there, and it wouldn't hurt to email the people you'd like to present *now* for possible engagements "whenever they're in your area". I've never needed to pay anybody -- the non-vendors want to give back to the community and promote themsleves, and the vendors, of course, want to sell you something.
Over any stretch of time you can count on a the following:
Personal experience: A presenter from a Very Large Pacific Northwest Software Company once wandered around the group's previous meeting location while the rest of us waited disdainfully for him clear on the other side of town. A phone call or email beforehand would have solved this problem easily.
There are as many topics that will be interesting to a good users' group as there are people who attend. Over the years, the Java users' group took on subjects as widely varied as Extreme Programming, VRML, and the local job market.
If you take on the responsibility of organizing a group, one of the perks is picking the occasional tangent topic that is of particularly interesting to you (so long as there's a connection back to your main subject area, of course!)
For the Ruby crowd, it's less of a problem at the moment, but I can see ISPs and development software vendors offering to speak often enough that you could book late 2007 and 2008 with just sales pitches. Vendor presentations are often great, but it's good to mix it up with technical presentations.
I think workshops are a great idea right now -- a Rails install fest, for example. Hmm, that might only take the first ten minutes...
I hope this post will live for quite a while, so please add any ideas you've found helpful in the comments section. If they remind me of specific advice, I'll revise the list above.
See you at the next group meeting!
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sat, 14 Jan 2006 21:30:00 GMT
I gave a Ruby on Rails demo recently at LAJUG, inaugurating their 10th year of operation since I started it in 1996.
I spent good many days writing a rudimentary outlining application to produce a PowerPoint-style slideshow.
Each day (and sometimes twice a day) I would execute “rails present” and proceed to rebuild my entire application from scratch so I could do a fluid presentation for the group.
I learned a few things about creating a good Rails demo, so here they are:
First, if you’re like me and the joy in programming is creating new functionality, be especially careful about feature creep. I probably blew an entire day fooling around with features I didn’t need to show. (Reording lists via AJAX calls comes to mind).
If you’re just trying to duplicate David Heinemeier Hansson’s excellent “Whoops!” screencast, then watch it as many times as you can stomach and make sure you can duplicate it screen for screen. There’s worse things you can do.
Practice, practice, practice!
Unlike more conceptual presentations, a good Ruby on Rails presentation, especially an intro presentation, should include running code. Running code means you need to rehearse, saying out loud what you intend to say as you do your demo, and looking for gaps in your presentation.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sat, 17 Dec 2005 05:36:00 GMT
I’ll be 43 this Sunday. I write code every day. C++ Linux graphics code in the daytime, Ruby on Rails AJAX stuff at night.
Here’s what I think. Guys my age have mortgages and children. We need to earn at the higher end of our capacity. For some guys that means moving into management (for organizations that value management over engineering). For some it means developing ever more arcane specializations.
If you’re a twentysomething IT developer, you aren’t even going to see us specialized guys. We’re busy with problems that involve domain knowledge you’ve never needed to learn, fiddly weird hardware, languages that are too low-level, or too high-level to be part of mainstream curricula and entry-level jobs.
I ran a great number of developer interviews at one of the start-ups I worked at a few years ago. Almost all the candidates, young and old, were duds—but sometimes some graybeard engineer would show up and just floor us with his knowledge and understanding. Inevitably, he’d get a better offer, and vanish again into the rarified realms from which he descended.
I don’t think age is the issue. Value is. If you keep learning and remain valuable, there will be opportunity.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:04:00 GMT
Creativity is in the air.
Jill is writing her novel for NaNoWriMo, and Paul Graham is talking about new ideas for startups.
Me, I’m just trying to catch up after blowing off nearly all the boring, responsible stuff in my life to prep demos of xdraw for Web 2.0 and RubyConf.
At work, I’m derriere-deep in Purify and Valgrind, hunting down memory leaks.
Something I’ve noticed about creativity. It often needs to be preceded and followed by periods of “plain old work.”
Somewhere in the repetition, and boredom, and frustration of just working through something, you think “a #@!# computer could do this.” and POW!
That’s where they come from, for me, anyway.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:32:00 GMT
I remember I met a mainframe programmer once who could compile IBM assembly code in his head.
Do you think he really misses doing that now?
People are creative, resourceful, pleasure-loving, inventive and funny.
So, why do we ennoble jobs that turn these wonderful creatures into interchangeable machines? Why do we fight to make assembly-line jobs high-paying?
We should be fighting to make it unprofitable to employ human beings in any endevour that is unpleasant, dangerous, demeaning or dull. Ancient Greek steam engines were never adopted because slaves were too cheap. Let’s go the other way, now that we live here in the future. Let’s push to make automation so cheap that even slaves are more expensive. (That way, you see, there’s no reason to have slaves).
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:38:00 GMT
This morning on NPR I heard a piece about Chicago’s famed Second City improv comedy group teaching their techniques to Fortune 500 groups.
They mentioned the principle of “Yes, and” as opposed to “No, but.”
Macolm Gladwell talks about this in Blink
I think the current entrepreneurial boom is a movement of “Yes, and” rather than, “No, but.”
Yes, we can make that happen. AND we can do it quickly and cheaply. AND we can build upon software that is freely available.
Funny how things can work out.
