The Third Bit

Mail Messages per Day

And these are just the ones I save…

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Back when I was as old as my students are now, I daydreamed about being a better-looking Buckaroo Banzai: rock star, brain surgeon, and all-around hero. These days, I daydream about search and replace. I’ve spent almost twenty hours that I really don’t have trying to get the new slides for the Software Carpentry course to format properly. Even with help from a couple of very smart people, there are still weird formatting glitches on Firefox, and they still look like crap on Internet Explorer. I’d really, really like to do a global search and replace on CSS—and when I say “global”, I mean it literally. I’d like to replace every shred of CSS on the planet with something that works and makes sense and doesn’t suck this much life force out of the people trying to use it.

I wouldn’t stop there, though. No, no, no, I wouldn’t stop there. [TODO: link to an MP3 of a mad scientist laughing maniacally.] My students have now spent more than a week figuring out how to work around Django‘s handling of unauthenticated users—search and replace. Ssetting up to webcast Software Carpentry lectures between Toronto and Edmonton is proving much harder than expected (our options seem to be riding a dinosaur, spending money that we don’t have, or using a low-res system with no guarantees of service quality). If I could have one superpower, just one, I’d replace ‘em all with something—anything—that just plain worked.

Two and a half weeks until we start trying to teach scientists how to use computers more effectively. I feel distinctly unqualified for the task right now; here’s hoping the next 18 days leave me feeling qualified…

But on the bright side, I have lunches like this to look forward to almost every day.

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DemoCamp 21 has been announced: July 28, 6-9 pm in the Rogers Communications’ theatre at One Mount Pleasant. Tickets will be released a few days before the event, but as David Crow says, the best way to get a spot is to apply to present. Look forward to seeing you there!

DemoCamp

Ryan Feeley spent the day with us fixing up CSS for the new Software Carpentry slides and critiquing the look and feel of Basie and MarkUs. It was lots of fun—thanks, Ryan.

Later: see the Basie Blog for some of what Ryan said.

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…with Grandma looking on proudly:

Family

Phyliss Lee finished working with us this past Friday—she’s leaving next week for a year-long internship in Japan.  To speed her on her way, the other summer students each contributed one tune to a mixed CD. If you’re wondering what hip young nerds listen to these days, here they all are:

• Queen: Don’t Stop Me Now
• Coldplay: In My Place
• Israel Kamakawiwo’ole: Somewhere Over the Rainbow
• Dala: Drive Through Summer
• Liquid Tension Experiment: Kindred Spirits
• James Keelaghan: Orion
• Goran Bregovic: Lullaby
• The Kinks: Apeman
• Manu Chao: Mano Negra
• Peter Gabriel: I Have the Touch
• Bob Sinclair: World Hold On

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Two books that I’ve read and enjoyed recently:

1. Philip Ball: Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. Ball uses the construction of the great Gothic cathedral as a lens through which to examine the intellectual and technical world of Medieval Europe. Like all of his books, there is sometimes more detail than anyone but a fellow enthusiast could want, but that’s a minor quibble—his descriptions of the interplay between half-remembered Platonic philosophy, doctrinal disputes within the Church, the economic boom of the 1200s, and the invention of ever-more-sophisticated engineering practices is fascinating. I particularly liked the chapter that traced the development of the arches and flying buttresses that are the hallmarks of Gothic style: each new idea was a response to earlier problems that in turn created problems and possibilities of its own. There is much here for software architects to mull over…
2. Andrew Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A retired US Army colonel whose son died in Iraq, Bacevich now teaches history in Boston. “Caustic” doesn’t even begin to describe this book: its cold analysis traces the failures of the American military-political complex in the last forty years to Americans’ unwillingness to acknowledge that every bill must eventually be paid. While lip service is paid at the end to the possibility of renewal, Bacevich very powerfully makes the case that the US has already sown the seeds of its own demise. Democrats and Republicans alike are weighed, measured, and found wanting, as is the American public as a whole. There is much here for everyone to mull over…

Books

Congratulations once again to Carolyn MacLeod, Jeremy Handcock, and Samira Abdi Ashtiani on completing their Master’s degrees.

Photo courtesy of Patrick Smith

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Fifty years ago, we were supposed to have a base on the moon by now, plus flying cars and computers we could talk to.  What we got instead were the Internet, women’s rights, and global warming.  I think this is why I’m not as excited by nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and the social web as I feel I ought to be—they’re so obvious that they’re almost certainly not what the future is actually going to look like.  I’m much more interested in stories like this one about Toronto (possibly) allowing people to keep chickens after a decades-long ban—backyard chickens, in the 21st Century—or this article in New Scientist that includes the sentence, “In remote regions where farmers don’t have access to computers, they can use cellphones to record onto FoodReg’s online database the time and place the crop was harvested.”  I think our future—if we have one—will mix high tech and low tech in ways that would have seemed perverse to Asimov, Clarke, and other “hard SF” writers a generation ago.  Books like Ian MacDonald’s River of Gods feel like a better guess these days than “Next Stop: Mars!”  The questions I’m asking myself are (a) how do we grow to this future, rather than collapse to it, and (b) what can I do to help?

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…and it’s undoubtedly useful, but still, Cloudsafe makes me nervous: how do I know my information is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to the site operator?

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