Kathy Sierra talks about making better users (IT Conversations Gov 2.0)
I like this talk about how making passionate users. “Don’t make a better [widget], make a better USER of [widget].” This distinction enables enthusiasm and engagement.
IT Conversations | Gov 2.0 Summit from O’Reilly Media | Kathy Sierra.
Is Living Simply Anti-Modern?
My wife was tentatively offered a Kindle for Christmas, with the added note that, there are plenty of public-domain works you can download for it.
“Why would I want a Kindle when all the books I do read are in the library?” was her response.
Walking to the library is a healthy activity. It keeps the kids active and occupied. It supports and validates our right to have libraries in general. A Kindle keeps you at home, distracts you from the kids, and teaches your kids that owning a gadget is more important than visiting the library or going for a walk.
A decade ago, I would have loved to have a Kindle, because I read avidly, especially technical publications that I really now should give away to people and resent having to store on my book shelves. A lot of these technical books are not appropriate for libraries or even book stores because they are essentially obese technical periodicals typically lacking enduring value. I’d rather not buy technical books any more, I’d rather be part of an online technical community like StackOverflow that maintained living knowledge of these technologies.
Is refusing a Kindle being a Luddite? Luddites objected to textile industrialization and its exploitative child labor practices. Modern Luddites refuse to give up the value of traditional means where gadgets rear up. Do Kindles, iPads, and other electronic book substitutes erode literacy? Probably not. Erode community? If you consider that if e-books are cheap enough to lull people into not to funding their libraries…yes. Did we see the same with cars? The value of parks, sidewalks, and downtowns across America all changed when we started driving every where, and considered that convenience more important than funding the simple safety of sidewalks.
People who live with gadgets end up throwing the gadgets away. People who have Internet tend to stay home instead of go out, or get less sleep to use it. Cars are an example of a gadget that people make you fat, pollute and kill people regularly. Most of us own lots of gadgets and they probably don’t make us healthier. They also tend to isolate you from your community. We are fools for technology. I know I’m one. As I age, I find that technology shows me what a sucker I have been, too. Staying healthy and living more simply does not require much technology. Biotechnology isn’t necessary for simple food.
If we don’t end up with a Kindle, that’s fine with me. Some gadgets are pretty handy, I admit: smart phones rank in my book…I appreciate those technologies which allows me to be active and social.
Highlighting with Wordlight (Visual Studio)
I love being able to double click on a word and seeing all occurances of it highlighted in my editor. I think the Highlighter plugin for jEdit, and I’m disappointed that there are no free plugins of that quality for VS. Wordlight comes close, tho.
Talk like a Pirate, Code like a Scurvey Dog! (Escape Pod)
This is a remarkably fun pirate hacker story that borders on magical reality. It really captures the pre-bubble esprit-de-haxor of the 90′s.
OpenSSH Public Key Authentication
This looks like a good guide on using ssh-keygen, the authorized_keys file, and using ssh-agent.
DIY iPod Touch Microphone Cable
Michael Dodd pointed this out to me.
Teaching Kids Programming (DNR, MSDN Blogs)
Second grade is not too early to teach girls or boys to program. This episode of DotNetRocks interviews volunteers who are working with their local schools to introduce elementary programming into after-school clubs and even into school curricula. The blog post below is an inspiring account of girls learning to program.
Do your browser plugin check today! Yes–YOU!
Please keep this browser plugin checker in your bookmark bar at the top of your browser:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/
…and click on it right now. There’s a current Adobe Shockwave Flash exploit that affects all browsers around. Please click that bookmark every day, it’s quick, take a few seconds, and you don’t want to spend your time reformatting your computer because some banner ad took over your computer.
The psych behind seductive apps (UIESpoolcast)
Ever wonder why your kids really really … really gotta collect that one last Lego toy? Why do you hypermile? Why do you collect more and more twitter followers? Ah: set completion, feedback and scarcity are at play. http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/05/19/spoolcast-stephen-andersons-designing-seductive-business-apps-live/
OpenPlans – Open Source City Planning
Here are some wonderful open source volunteerism-centered city planning web applications being demoed in NY. I really like the idea of letting citizens suggest places to focus city services, not just bike racks, bike paths, but things like schools and bus routes. This could really lower the bar from showing up to city hall with a petition…maybe someday you could twitter or FB-like a bike path into existence?
Database Joins, Reddit, NoSQL
There’s been a lot of online discussion about NoSQL this year. Thomas Gideon produced a podcast episode about using NoSQL vs joins. This morning I was pointed to this Highscalability post about Reddit. Quoting:
There are no joins in the database and you must manually enforce consistency. No joins means it’s really easy to distribute data to different machines. You don’t have to worry about foreign keys are doing joins or how to split the data up. Worked out really well. Worries of using a relational database are a thing of the past.
This generalized use of databases really illustrates the zeitgeist of rapid development. NoSQL projects are aiming right there: quick rev time, low schema impedence, built-in replication, no assumption of join usage because a document-oriented database model often presumes the more expensive computation of data subsets at the application level anyhow. In a pre-computed/batched-result environment, this supplants the need to sweat over high-performance joins.
Gideon believes that proper use of SQL databases are efficient and performant, but that novice uses and ORM devices (Hibernate, e.g.) are commonly over-applied so that performance at scale quickly dips. The comment on cmdln’s NoSQL rant by Mr characterizes the choice succinctly:
It does distribution of data out of the box, that is, it is so simplified, ingrained in the product that you don’t even think twice about them. But with SQL databases, sharding, distribution is an afterthought. Not that you cannot DO these with SQL databases, it’s just that with nosql these tasks are SIMPLER. Included in the product from day one.
I’ve certainly thought a fair amount on the topic of partitioning and sharding in light of the fact that MySQL 5.0 does not provide these (though 5.1 and later are better for it). But the whole notion of using a document-oriented database is very attractive when the majority of your operations are simply not relational.
2010-05-17 Web apps should be fast
Have I worked on any applications that have all 10 of these concepts? It’s an interesting read. It mostly speaks towards building software that has charisma. I don’t think I’ve ever really worked on a product that has charisma. I’ve certainly helped speed sites up, and helped make them more useful. Many products I’ve worked on had a pile of features, most never looked very simple, and a few had web APIs.
I say charisma not because online media should display contemporary styles, but point 10 is “playful.” Most software won’t play a joke on you, or say anything funny, or not present itself as anything but entirely serious. I write shell scripts that are playful. If they die, or fail an assertion, they say “YOU FOOL!” and quit…but I’ve never made a web application that much slap-and-tickle.
If I had the time, I’d point out some of the Microsoft online help I’ve seen that’s really funny. For a while at least, they hired some characters that really made rather lighthearted help documentation. That’s an interesting example of playful.
2010-05-16 Ten Dumb Things (TechRepublic)
This list of ten IT no-nos is handy wisdom. Honestly, these things happen to all us IT people, and I’ve certainly learned some lessons here.
All Ur Friendz R Belong To Us
This is a good graphic displaying how Facebook’s “public” policy is now.
Translating Filenames — Bash Voodoo Style #linux
This is an example of using Bash to convert a crazy apache log and translating the filename into an IIS log pattern:
d=`date +%Y%m%d`
find k -type f \
| while read filename
do
nextfile="${filename/k\/done?0.www\./k2/www-Server_T${d}_}.log"
echo "$nextfile"
cat $filename | $translate > "$nextfile"
done
I love how I can refer to a shell variable ($d) inside a string translation (${d}).
Facebook Profile Data that Anyone Can See
Here is a site that allows you to browse your Facebook Profile data as if you were a 3rd party. I heard about this Zesty.ca page from TWiG episode 40. This Facebook data would be provided using their Graph API. A tip from TWiG episode 41 mentioned is how students have started using dummy data on Facebook–making up handles, silly locations, and bogus marital relationships to their teachers and whatnot. Jeff Jarvis makes an interesting point: Facebook is passing by and opportunity to champion actual privacy by not providing it–thus the more we assume we have no privacy on Facebook, the less honest data people will provide Facebook to begin with.
Last happy thots on LinuxFest Northwest 2010 #lfnw
As always, I completely enjoyed meeting all the new and returning people at LinuxFest Northwest. I was especially proud to finally shake Brian Aker’s hand and thank him for his work on memcached and how inspired I was about the ideas behind Gearman. Gearman is a job-coalescing processing protocol that can solve map-reduce problems. Please check it out! This is more impressive than memcached by a mile!
I was very interested to talk to the brewers showing their Linux controlled brewing. I was especially honored to meet the chair of OSBridge and friends at the PostgreSQL table. I would have put a shiny Pg shirt on Krow if we coulda caught him…
It was intersting seeing the talk on airline, healthcare/medical adoption of Linux, too. Always glad to hear progress there. Interesting to note that Sun Micro’s thin clients are still widely regarded as the best in those areas, too.
I really like the idea of exploring the possibilities of getting kids to do presentations at LinuxFest. I asked my oldest what he might want to present on, and he said, “teaching my mom how to operate my MP3 player.” Well…maybe in a few years he’ll be ready to talk to his peers at BTC for LinuxFest NW.
And of course, it was great to meet up with Bryan and Chris and chat about kids, camping and keeping animals.
My talk on Apache rewites went … OK. I was not rehearsed, my notes were disorganized, and 1/3 of my room slipped out on me. Those that remained had fun discussing java, c#, cookie processing and http auth wrt codeigniter–so it wasn’t a total waste at all. But I really gotta organize the concepts down if I really want to present an intro to the topic, and at that, I bombed…sorry. Maybe just a talk on Apache would be more useful. I should prolly leave the mod_rewrite topic be a BOF slot.
Anyhow–I’m sure I’m leaving something out, but now its time to get some rest. Many thanks to all the Fest organizers that helped put this on! It is a valuable experience every year and I always recommend it.
Looking forward to 2011! The talks, the next batch of brews, and seeing if anyone else wants to cycle there, too! Nerd bike ride…?
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.
Lightfoot Cycles: Smoothie
At LinuxFest Northwest I met an avid bicyclist: Victor Odlivak. He pointed out a northwest recumbent bicycle manufacturer named Lightfoot Cycles. Victor sent me a link to their Smoothie model. I am impressed by the features on this recumbent–it has a BionX power assist and a bench seat. This would appeal to riders that have hills to climb on their commute and might be averse to forward-bent posture on a upright bicycle. Long-arm handlebars are much more intuitive to operate than hip-level steering as well.
Lightfoot Cycles makes a variety of recumbent bikes and trikes.
Lightfoot also produces trikes (with power assist). I have opined here previously that I think recumbent trikes are an ideal HPV solution for mothers with children and groceries, or anyone with limberness challenges where balance or straddling a tall top-tube is not an option. Many of the Lightfoot trikes look like they can haul enough cargo to become an ice-cream cart, taco-stand, or even lug a keg of beer.
I’d lug a keg of beer on a trike, yeah!
LinuxFest Northwest (Bellingham Herald)
Always great to see the local paper write a few inches about LinuxFest Northwest. Funny ’bout how both “Microsoft Windows” and “Vista” get mentioned in such a short article.
Tail the Latest Log File
I’m grateful for Cygwin. I wouldn’t know how to do this in cmd–though I should probably learn how to do it in PoSH.
find LogFiles/W3SVC1 -type f | xargs ls -1tr | tail -n1 | xargs tail -F
I need to make it an alias now….
Longest MySQL Replication Run? #lfnw #mysql
I’ve heard of people replicating MySQL from coast to coast. I’d love to hear if anyone attending @lfnw has longer replication runs. Happy to share some examples at my talk on Sat. http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/sessions/mysql-performance-and-availability
