Vision and Action
30 July 2005
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
This wonderful proverb from +Seraphim.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
This wonderful proverb from +Seraphim.
NYT: An increase of 10 percent in new book prices would raise used sales by less than 1 percent. Some book authors are concerned that selling used books side-by-side with new books (like Amazon.com does) will cost them money. However, used books drive demand for new books. As Cory Doctorow points out, knowing you can get a good price when you want to sell a book makes it more likely that you’ll buy the new book. And, as anyone can clearly see, used books only exist when new books are available. Why is this interesting? Because many publishers and producers of information (by which I mean everything from science fiction, to software, to music, to databases) are scared that they’re loosing control of that information. The fear is that loss of control means loss of income. In fact, I believe this is not necessarily true: that profit does not require control. See, for example, POSSE: this is a group of entrepreneur’s that do not have complete control of their means of making a living. In fact, they’re attempting to capitalize on the fact that they don’t control the source for the software that they service.
I came across Joel Spokely’s assertion that “… the most satisfying careers, if you’re a software developer, are at actual software companies.” Something here didn’t sound quite right. “What about Open Source Software?” I thought. Then I saw POSSE: Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE) is a local organization of entrepreneurs who rely on and develop OSS to help businesses succeed. See, there’s this whole other group of programmers besides the money-and-fame rock stars that Joel is talking about. Sure, they’re awesome developers and they’re excited about what they do. But people who work on Free Software are doing amazing things, too. Usually, it has been in their free time, often for their own use, so it doesn’t have the spit-and-polish that commercial software has. Even that is changing, though. Things like Beagle, Firefox and Ubuntu Linux show us that even Free Software has the power to be “remarkable software.” The sort of stuff the Joel says you need rock stars for.
Perlism for the day:
sub any(&@) { my $sub = shift; for(@_) {return 1 if $sub->()}; return undef; } print "blah\n" if any {$_==1} 0, 1, 2;
Cargo Cult Science in action. Watch it work for children’s car seats.
Freakonomics author find that the seats don’t save lives. New York Times does a review. Researcher confirms the conclusions (and NYT doesn’t publish his letter). Publisher of disproved report writes a letter to the NYT re-asserting their claims and NYT publishes the letter.
Of further interest: The highway commission evidently refused to publish a report that showed (no matter how they twisted the data) that children’s car seats in the 70s were worse than just using a safety belt.
Anytime a popular fantasy book is published, the critics come out of the woodwork. The Harry Potter series is a one such target. They’re mediocre books: Easy (for me) to read, but not very compelling.
Still, some people get worked up about them because they contain “magic”. Now, the magic in these books is little more than some sort of special technology. “Wave your wand if you want your toast buttered.” There are magical creatures, but they seem incidental.
In any case there is absolutly no spiritual aspect to the books at all. Some people look at this and say “Oh no! I can’t find God! These are evil books!” Others (me) look at this and say “So?”
In any case my favorite review of the Harry Potter series is from (retired) Bishop Seraphim: Harry Potter books can’t suck enough!
Business IT (as well as major media) are the South Seas islanders of the web. (I’ve still got to post about our camping trip to the Smoky’s…)
Indiana seems to be the first (largish) state in Google Maps that is completely mapped out. Since I grew up in Wakarusa, IN, this is wonderful. I can see the aerial view of the route I remember walking to school, and see how much (or how little) has changed since I last visited.
Speaking of Google Maps, Terah (of Forest of the Plains) might be interested in MidwestBridges.com — though the title is a misnomer since it only has Kansas Bridges (with pictures!) at the moment.
Any LiveJournal user (Alan) should now be able to comment here using the OpenID system. Just so you know. This works on all OpenWeblog sites. Soon any MovableType user or TypeKey user should be able to use this as well. WordPress, Druupal, Bugzilla components are all in the works. Brad does it again! Anyway, besides that little bit of technical arcana the only thing I have to share is my bike route this morning. At least I wanted to share it, but it looks like Google is borking the page. Hopefully I can get out and get some exercise every morning so I can maintain some stamina and reduce waistline-bloat.
Sunday, I arrived in Toronto for YAPC. Getting into Canada was actually more difficult than getting out. This is mostly because the gate agent for US Air Express didn’t realize that people traveling by air between the two countries don’t have to have a passport until 2006. If YAPC is in Canada again next year, I will definitely have a passport ready. But after a delayed flight on a small plane, I did finally arrive. Instead of using the $300/night hotels close by, I stayed in the hotel/dorm that YAPC was held in. Which means that there were some summer students around. Like the freshman I overheard in the elevator: “There must be a Star Trek convention or something going on this week.” (“Yeah, there are a lot of Dorks at YAPC” I did not say.) Since I arrived late, no one was around, so I asked about a close theater and headed off to see “Batman Begins” (which is far superior to every other comic-book superhero movie I’ve seen). The next day YAPC began. One of the things I was hoping to find was some information on project planning. This is a weak area for me. Before Larry even gave the keynote, I met a consultant who recommended “Planning Extreme Programming”. Luckily, this is also a small book — about 200 pages — so based on the reviews I read and the consultant’s recommendation, I expect it to be packed with information rather than filler. I attended a few talks on testing and learned a lot here that will be useful as I implement the testing infrastructure where I work. Specifically “one test is better than none, and two is better than one” provides motivation to start getting at least one test written for each module, each program I write — just to verify that it loads properly. After that, I’ll add some simple functionality tests. I also learned about or was reminded of some Perl modules that are available on CPAN that will be useful to me as I begin testing more. Tuesday, I heard a talk by Steve Purkis of MultiMAP about making a MySQL database “Highly Available”. Their solution is highly Perl-specific, and I found from his talk some really good resources like DRDB. He also confirmed my suspicion that our current MySQL configuration has to go. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ll have to do some home-brew synchronization work. Why, oh why, doesn’t this JUST WORK?!? Oh, that’s right, I’m using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL (which has working clustering, instead of just the promise of it. ) Tuesday night there was a dinner cruise on the lake. And I met Ricardo Signes (rjbs), the guy who wrote the code behind de.lirio.us, — a site that is a clone of the O’Reilly-funded de.li.cio.us — de.lirio.us made a really big splash when it went public because people liked de.li.cio.us but the code for de.lirio.us is open source. That and the fact that whoever is running de.li.cio.us made a big stink. (To be clear, rjbs isn’t running the de.lirio.us site.) And I’m finally beginning to feel like Pennsylvania is a pretty decent place to live. While Lancaster County isn’t a hotbed of technology, we have people like rjbs and mjd in the Philly area and big Perl shops like pobox.com here as well. Wednesday, I got the most out of the lightening talks. Two projects were announced there: JSAN and AnnoCPAN. JSAN hopes to be for JavaScript what CPAN is for Perl. You can even load Javascript “modules” directly from JSAN. Hopefully people will start to use this more and we’ll all get some nice tools to use for AJAX. I’m jealous of AnnoCPAN. I was going to start putting POD pages up on perlwiki.org so that people could add to them or fix them as needed. Oh well, AnnoCPAN does look pretty nice. And annotation of documentation is probably better than rewriting it. Jim Keenan’s talk on Phalanx encouraged me to get with the Harrisburg.pm people at the conference about starting in. I met Jim two weeks ago at the book release party, so I had an idea of what he was up to, but his talk really pushed me over the edge. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some great social hacking happening. Finally, here’s a list of CPAN modules I learned about (or was reminded of) while at YAPC. Each of these is worth a look.