The Third Bit

How I think of myself when I’m giving a talk:

How the audience sees me:

Uncategorized

Over on the Architecture of Open Source Applications blog, we’ve posted a plea to GitHub to let people build Facebook-style plugin applications.  Please give it a read, and if you like the idea, re-tweet the blurb at the bottom.

Uncategorized

I have a Mac. It has a power adapter:

The plug that goes into the power outlet looks like this:

I am in Oslo. Their power outlets look like this:

I brought a universal adapter with a double-round mode:

but its input looks like this:

Whoops: a North American plug with a round ground pin won’t fit. My old Mac adapter fit—it didn’t have the ground pin, just two flat power pins that folded down into the brick. That’s why I thought this would work, but no, I upgraded my power adapter, and it broke backward compatibility.

Luckily, the shop at Heathrow Airport sells gadgets that have UK output pins:

and three-pin round-ground North American input slots:

which means I can cobble this together to recharge my laptop:

Tomorrow, I will show this to students in the workshop I’m teaching and ask, “Does your software look like this?”

Uncategorized

The first of Philip Reeve’s prequels to the “Hungry Cities” books for young adults is Fever Crumb; the same would also enjoy Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner. The Chris Wooding “Tales of the Ketty Jay” series (steampunk Firefly, kind of) starts with Retribution Falls, and the most recent of the Joe Abercrombie books is The Heroes. We also liked Ex-Heroes, a superheroes-vs-zombies story, and Bitter Seeds. I really liked Felix Gilman’s Thunderer, but found the sequel slow and complicated; The Half-Made World (same author) was another good read, but the sequel isn’t out yet. Wouldn’t recommend Grossman’s The Magicians unless you like whiny, self-pitying protagonists; Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Hugh Howey’s Wool, and Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House are all much better reads.

Uncategorized

Here’s an experiment you can do at home: for just one day, keep track of how many email messages, blog posts, tweets, and Yammer [1] updates reach your eyeballs, your brains, and your fingers, i.e., how many are presented to you, how many you actually pay attention to, and how many you act on (if only to save for later). Here’s my data from last Wednesday:

I admit my metrics are a imprecise—I didn’t use eyetracking to determine how many tweets I actually paid attention to, for example—but the numbers are still sobering.

[1] Mozilla uses Yammer internally instead of Facebook. I haven’t logged into the latter in almost two years.

Uncategorized

Earlier today, a friend of mine used his iPhone to shell into a remote machine, edit a file with Vi, and commit it to version control:

Yes, that’s right: he used a hand-held computer a million times more powerful than any available in 1970 to connect over a ubiquitous wireless network to a computer billions of times more powerful than any available in 1970 to run a set of tools that do their best to emulate a line printer. Coincidentally, at about the same time as he was doing this, I was holding a sticky note with “Can you hear me?” written on it up in front of the camera built into my laptop to transmit a real-time video image to people thousands of kilometers away because, well, because it was simpler than anything else I could do at the time.

All of which prompts me to rephrase William Gibson: the past is still here, it’s just not evenly distributed either.

Uncategorized

Maya is a little girl who faces some big challenges:

Now, Prentke Romich Company and Semantic Compaction Systems want to take away the software that let her say, “Daddy, I love you,” for the very first time. It’s all about patents, except it’s not: it’s about big companies abusing the patent system to smother smaller ones.

I don’t normally get involved in online campaigns, or ask other people to, but this one’s different. Apple recently took down the app that lets Maya speak because the patent dispute hadn’t been resolved, and there’s the very real risk that they might disable it remotely. Please tell them, and Prentke Romich, what you think, and please show your support for Speak for Yourself (the company that makes the app).

• The whole story
• The “contact us” email address listed on Prentke Romich’s website: info@prentrom.com
• The email address listed in the court documents for Apple: appstorenotices@apple.com
• Prentke Romich’s Facebook page
• Speak for Yourself’s Facebook page

Uncategorized

Here’s a typical day:

Uncategorized

From George Orwell’s diary, June 6, 1942:

I saw that I was up against the official mind, which sees everything as a problem in administration and does not grasp that at a certain point, ie. when certain economic interest are menaced, public spirit ceases to function. [The basic assumption of such people is that everyone wants the world to function properly and will do his best to keep the wheels running. They don’t realise that most of those who have the power don’t care a damn about the world as a whole and are only intent on feathering their own nests.] I can’t help feeling a strong impression that Cripps has already been got at. Not with money or anything of that kind of course, nor even by flattery and the sense of power, which in all probability he genuinely doesn’t care about: but simply by responsibility, which automatically makes a man timid. Besides, as soon as you are in power your perspectives are foreshortened. Perhaps a bird’s eye view is as distorted as a worm’s eye view.

Uncategorized

Uncategorized