All Ur Friendz R Belong To Us
This is a good graphic displaying how Facebook’s “public” policy is now.
Consider: Organic, the World Over?
This is a great little article about how organic farming should be able to scale globally. I’ve heard many interviews on various science podcasts where guests (and their sponsoring corporations) are convinced that existing agriculture techniques are incapable of feeding the whole world…thus the “obvious need” for GMO crops. Let’s presume that’s false for a moment so as to better consider some pros and cons: chemical fertilizer is a form of petroleum dependency, GMO crops create economic dependency, GMO crops create legal and ecological hazards, encouraging industrial scale farming decreases community self-reliance and increases petrol use with increased shipping…I’m sure I could list more.
I’m a technologist, a programmer, I’m where I am because of industrialization, industrial farming, and very likely am alive because of industrialized medicine. There must be balance between community and corporation, however.
Imagine Bank Subsidy for Community Solar
I stumbled up this news release about a bank in Uttar Pradesh, India, that is providing loans to help install solar panels. I’m going to alter a section and make it more American just for the sake of illustration–to help you image the number of people this press release is talking about:
For providing the solar panels, Mumble Bank has partnered with a leading manufacturer of solar equipment. The solar panels costs US $305 US, of which the bank finances up to US $249. To purchase this system, beneficiaries must make a down payment of US $57 and pay equated monthly instalments of US $5.55 for 60 months (interest payable at 12% per annum). Mumble Bank chairman, Bob Mumble said: “By providing easy loans for setting up solar photovoltaic systems, we have been responsible for lighting up the homes of over 28,000 rural families. By March 2011, we plan to install 50,000 solar panels across the community.”
First point to make is obviously, I’m guessing the energy needs in rural India are very likely 1/10th American usage. But multiply those numbers by 10. Why are you not seeing flyers in your mail for this? Wouldn’t all banks and insurance companies be interested investing in this kind of economic stability in America? Someone–please tell me why solar installations seem so rare in America?
(Tech Nation) Interview with John Hagel
Ever consider what role passion plays in your career? Do passionate people interested in a common topic group geographically? This interview with John Hagel discusses these topics. The most interesting quote from the interview: “…the larger the organization, the lower the level of passion; whereas people in smaller businesses show higher levels of passion. Entrepreneurs, for instance, follow their passion wherever it leads.” Hagel expresses that as the world changes ever faster that people who pursue the the directions their passions lie will be motivated to be successful. One might infer that feeling trapped in a job is exactly the opposite: harder work and less fulfilling. Another experience Hagel relates an insight from is his interviews with CEOs: business leaders repeatedly desired more passionate employees. Unfortunately, they meant eager, obedient…more willing to do the tasks set in front of them. Passion is the opposite of predictability: it is a point on the horizon that involves exploration and beats a wandering trail.
(Smart City) Carjacked
http://www.smartcityradio.com/show/2783/carjacked
Wonderful discussion on the uniquely American problems of divorcing ourselves from our cars. I found the point about how automobile culture actually economically represses the not-rich because the proportion of income spent on petrol, tolls, and maintenance is so much greater. If public transit were used, that’s thousands of dollars a year more in effective income…or savings.
Don’t forget…every day is Bike to Work Day ;-)
Remember “In the Trenches”? That’s How I Learned of LOPSA #lfnw
I chatted with a few of the guys at the LOPSA booth and mentioned that I first learned about LOPSA by listening to Kevin Devin’s In the Trenches podcast. This Friends In Tech show was insightful, informative and inspiring in that it presented intelligent and professional discussion about the profession of system administration, not merely righteous badmouthing of L-users. It turned me on to the SOTY contest, for which I was nominated in 2008 2007 and received a T-shirt, even.
When NOT to Use a SAN?
The vast number of filesystems, distributed file systems, and network replication schemes available for Linux all come with learning curves and caveats. When does one actually want to avoid merely picking out an average SAN solution and go with a Linux oriented distributed storage solution like Gluster or NFS on DRBD?
50% Female Tech Employees?
Enrolling women in technology has been an ongoing topic for quite a while. Various communities like Ubuntu Women and many other groups have are focused on women in technology.
Scott Hanselman conducts a surprising interview with some women programmers in Egypt, showing an impressively equitable gender mix. Very inspiring!
Coping with Loss of Affluence
This article on coping with loss of affluence was rather apropos of this weekend’s Transition Whatcom event. Basically, the summary points outlines that in a transitioning economy, walking is an important activity for first world economies to re-learn as it becomes more necessary for mere transit, the coping with the loss of status of having a car, and at the same time walking in nature is therapeutic for this situation as well.
In Another Life: Solar Power
I am occasionally reminded of how much I admire the concepts of solar power and the future it could sustain.
If I were in a different line of work, it would likely be in the solar power industry. Renewable energy is a concept that’s satisfying to get behind, like it has become satisfying to become a bicycle commuter.
A casual googling for “Bellingham solar” brings up a hit to Western Washington Solar. The page summarizes a few very good points about making a domestic solar investment. If I didn’t have to worry about stockpiling savings and retirement (among other notable house projects), I would jump on a solar upgrade for my house. Unfortunately, it seems like a massive initial investment. I am very eager for prices in solar components to drop. (Who isn’t?)
I will blog more about solar power! I would love to hear from anyone who’s got a solar experience, even passive solar design. This is a topic I want to share.
Copyright Thought
Just now–looking at Slashdot and reading the post about 20,000 lawsuits of copyright infringement against BitTorrent users–makes me think that that copyright litigation is going to be a growth segment for the next decade. Like online advertising, online marketing and online gaming…copyright litigation is backed by solvent clientelle.
Back when I was first out of college, I chaffed at my first webmaster position, because I learned after a week that I was a tool of the chief merketer. That is not the role that garners respect from your engineering peers. (But it does pay rent nicely.). I am not so insensitive about our rights as to hitch my wagon to the RIAA or MPAA.
I did admit to Thomas Gideon recently in some feedback to his thecommandline.net podcast that I didn’t find the copyright segments as interesting as the programming segments. He did respond most kindly on that topic…but I don’t feel too guilty. I know that the RIAA and the MPAA are commercial gestapo organizations. They mold the best legal system we can buy. I vote a lot with my dollar: I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch network advertising, they only get a bit of an occasional DVD purchase from me. My friends know that these organizations are evil. Thomas, my friends and myself…we’re clearly on the same side.
However…a Desperate Programmer or Ambitious Consultancy would be eager to hitch up to the Media Establishment’s Legal Assult. There’s little living to be made supporting volunteer defenses…except that it is our digital living. It is a shame that the two sides are not both bound to a public budget which would hopefully expose the merits of a just argument, rather than reflect the amplitide of the affluent. (My thots on political campaigns are similar.)
Diffed and Merged…and Ported
“Hard at it,” is how you’d describe me these days. I’ve really learned a lot about programming C# in the last three weeks. There’s some stuff I like, even. I’m still, rather instinctively, feeling hesitant to praise Microsoft for anything…but it’s melting.
Consider this latest Tools episode from The Commandline podcast. Thomas Gideon describes a journey, somewhat similar to my own, about early programming in a Microsoft environment, discovering the power of Linux, and trying not to look back. I was rather overwhelmed the first time I tried programming console graphics using the Borland C compiler back in 1992. By 1996 I had taught myself C and Perl and even written an assembly compiler for a MIPS processor in Perl in a SunOS 4.x environment. I went on to programming CGIs in Perl but took a right turn at Cold Fusion more than once at two different jobs, dodging PHP both times. I ended up deep into Java, learning OO and Patterns and Refactoring (Fowler, Beck, Cunningham, et. al.) not out of righteousness….but out of desperation in deadline environments…seeking wisdom and arguments to battle absurd deadlines with. My biggest conclusion was the resulting confusion between reading all of Steven McConnell’s, Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler’s books in 18 months.
Almost all my book reading seems to have ended. I no longer (and not for a few year now, after 18 hour days and 2am pages and midnight server bloodbaths) care to know more than I do from a book. My reflection of being a smug, knows-better-than programmer may as well be a flattened aluminum can. Nothing stops the deadlines. Almost no human programmer/sysadmin can know enough to forestall the melting server farm. So when it came time to convert to C#, it was with resignation. I recognized pretty quickly that I needed to accept that. Anyhow, I’d never become the Free Software rock star I hoped to be…one day. Rather–I discovered that I was pretty darned human: with house, pets, and kids…and limits.
In two weeks of C# programming, I feel actually more productive than my first six months of Java programming. Experience, of course, plays a large role. Knowing how to Google-to-solve is actually so much more fluent to me than looking up anything in a book that I never considered buying a C# book. Poor trees. Poor publishing industry (watch me cry).
It was really interesting reflecting on Cmdline’s thoughts on using an IDE in his latest podcast. He describes how he’s somehow still not as productive with an IDE as with vim. (Boy, Kevin will like to hear that!) I’ve heard the same of Emacs programmers. (Did you know you can setup a VIM SERVER?) I, myself, would be “absocrippled” were I to lack bash (thus: cygwin). But presently, between Visual Studio 2008 and the Advanced Logging package for IIS, my estimation for the Microsoft Web platform has actually…grown.
I find the C# API is actually easier to use than the JDK API (from whence I last used it). Convenience methods and a bit of simplification of file operations seems to have made learning how to work with streams only a few hours of learning…not a day. The expressiveness of “properties” in C# is remarkable. That VS2008 has at least a few built in refactoring capabilities makes simple refactorings quite effortless. In to weeks of programming I’ve already probably thrown out 1/2 of the code I’ve written because I’ve refactored–leveraging properties.
None of these thing were as easy using vim and PHP. The IDEs I was using for Java were terribly heavy, a decade ago. The thing I miss most from jEdit so far is the Jdiff plugin. However, combining WinMerge, TortoiseSVN and the Comparison Tools add-in for Visual Studio off Codeplex gets me pretty close to the Jdiff plugin. And…I admit…an integrated debugger in an IDE is actually a pleasure to use. I was never comfortable getting the Zend IDE or Eclipse and Xdebug to fit together.
Thus…I admit…from a practical standpoint, I have been amazingly productive in the face of recent…platform adversity…you might say. Granted, I’ve never been a big IDE developer because…nothing is more distracting than a programming environment that slows down your “syntatical expression.” That I’m on the fastest workstation that anyone has ever bought me certainly helps the IDE do it’s job. But really, my situation could be so much more difficult.
I feel like I’ve accepted a lot of change and have remained competent in the face of it. I have to be grateful for that. And I remind myself…that even though it’s not F/LOSS software I’m developing with, really the real challenge in my life has not been the software, it’s been with programming and programming environments and business in general. The various businesses I’ve worked for have always presented (necessary) challenges for someone who’s naturally inclined to stay home and read sci-fi novels. F/LOSS was not extra-better at reducing my workload.
F/LOSS has always been better at providing turn-around in the face of unfunded development efforts. That’s the biggest change in the last decade: again working at a place where they spend money on you. In San Francisco, they spent money on us (while the VC lasted). But after the bubble popped, it was back to field-stripping your trusty AK47-vim editor on my aged 350mhz machine, waiting for the next small client to arrive. Who had cash for an IDE? “…from my cold dead hands” eh? Stripped down development habits are hard habits to break. Instructive, certainly. Character-building: undoubtedly!
So really the change has been getting me to grip the controls of an M1 Abrams. Microsoft really wants to keep their developers. Just listening to a few episodes of .Net Rocks, hearing about their Road Show really put into stark contrast the affluence Microsoft was offering compared to the frugality I was used to. I’d LOVE to attend a vim or jEdit launch party. Heh!
I’ve described a large difference in my professional life. I don’t want to make myself all worked up by re-treading some older moral points. My sense of panic is evaporating. Now it’s time to remember to pace myself.
Great gobs of FAIL from Amazon
Here’s a great write-up of the Amazon-Macmillan fight. I hadn’t realized how lame Amazon came out in this event.
