Posts (page 2)

Courtesy Bob Bannister, Martin Newell's 10-point hangover guide.  Brilliant.

I was thinking it'd be useful to have full text search of the pages in your del.icio.us account, or in the subset of pages for a tag.  This would yield a quality-filtered search (something the folks at Connexions call a 'lens').

Fortunately I don't have to build it, as it already exists.  The site is called searchfeedr, and lets you perform searches on the URLs found in various feeds.  It's unfortunately backed by Yahoo, whose interface I don't enjoy.

Might also be able to solve this problem using  Google Co-op w/ the filter set to an RSS feed.  I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.

Also, rollyo seems like another good alternative, though I can't tell whether they support an RSS feed as input yet.  If not, that'd be a pretty useful feature to add.

I'm gathering texts about learning to build software, and am starting to think the task looks far different than I'd imagined.  Particularly, I think I'd been originally considering a learning process far more linear and one-sided than what good learning actually looks like.  Chatting w/ folks and reading around is reminding me how important experience is for the learning process.

Research accumulating at my del.icio.us account.

For a bit more info about Connexions, check a talk that Rich Baraniuk gave a few months ago.  I worked with these folks when I lived in Houston--they're amazing people and it's good to see them thriving.

Watching Eben Moglen's insightful keynote address from the Plone conference, I've cobbled together an idea that I quite like.  It goes something like this:

Moglen observes that the primary economic commodity of the 21st century is software, replacing steel from the 20th century.  In his words:

We are moving to a world in which in the twenty-first century the most important activities that produce occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software. It is the infra-structural importance of software which is first important in the move to the post-industrial economy. It isn’t that software is itself a thing of value – that’s true. It isn’t that applications produce useful end-point activities, or benefit real people in their real lives. Though that’s true. It is that software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation. That’s crucial in economic history terms, because the driving force in economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to place, economic growth results; welfare improvements occur. They occur most rapidly among those who have previously been unable to transport value into the market. In other words, infrastructure improvement has a tendency to improve matters for the poor more rapidly than most other forms of investment in economic development.

Software is amazing for it's ability to craft substantial works out of little more than logical human thought.  As Frederick Brooks put it:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Going a bit further, I would say that it takes the following (admittedly broad) categories of inputs to build software:

• An idea.
  
• Hardware.
  
• Software that helps you make other software.
• Education about software construction.

These barriers to entry are being knocked down at an alarming rate right now.  The revolutionary One Laptop Per Child (olpc) project will soon put quality hardware into the hands of those who could scarce afford it before.  Open source software, in almost every imaginable domain, provides freely available and, crucially, freely modifiable versions of software utilities.  This is nowhere more prevalent than in software for construction of software, where some of the best tools are to be found in open source-land.

As for ideas, the rapid expansion of web 2.0 collaborative, community-oriented technologies creates the most fecund environment for their generation that one could imagine.  Couple this with the open-source model of idea-sharing, and you get something truly amazing.

It's on the education element that I think we're lacking.  Given that software craft opens up access to the economy of the 21st century, how does one learn it?  It seems that a way that people could learn software craft remotely and for free would be a valuable contribution to the world.

There are some ideas that could come together to help here.  First off, there's Connexions, an open-source, open-content repository for online learning materials and course creation.  Second, there's stuff at MIT's OpenCourseWare Initiative, though what I've explored so far suffers greatly from post-hoc PowerPoint syndrome, where you're stuck interpreting a set of bullet point notes that don't add up to full ideas.  Additionally, there's an amazing old intro to programming course online at MIT.

Seems like the task then would be composed of classification and organization of existing resources, advocacy for free-licensing other resources, and then finally creation of new content where gaps exist.  We'd also need to establish some sort of standard pedagogy, or at least classification of different software construction pedagogies, beforehand to keep entropy of the course at a manageable level.

Anyone interested?

I've begun reading Marilynne Robinson's "The Death of Adam".  Have ambled through the introduction--a confusing graft of beautiful humanistic prose to an oddly-placed mini-essay on how Calvinism was misinterpreted by lazy scholars.  It seems less a problem of bad writing than bad editing, though.  I'm reminded of Victor Hugo's multi-hundred page exploration of the Battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables (unabridged: 1463 pp, abridged: 416 pp).

Regardless, the bookends of the introduction resonate with me.  Robinson contends that we live with a reductive definition of reality now: meaning increasingly filtered to it's economic representation.  Reprinting her words in total, as I am enthralled by their craft as their substance:

"It seems to me that there is now the assumption of an intrinsic fraudulence in the old arts of civilization.  Religion, politics, philosophy, music are all seen by us as a means of consolidating the power of a ruling elite...If they have, by their nature, other motives than the ones they claim, if their impulse is not to explore or confide or question but only to manipulate, they cannot speak to us about meaning, or expand or refine our sense of human experience.   Economics, the great model among us now, indulges and deprives, builds and abandons, threatens and promises.  Its imperium is manifest, irrefragable--as it has been since antiquity.  Yet suddenly we act as if the reality of economics were reality itself, the one Truth to which everything must refer.  I can only suggest that terror at complexity has driven us back on this very crude monism.  We have reached a point where cosmology permits us to say that everything might in fact be made of nothing, so we cling desperately to the idea that something is real and necessary, and we have chosen, oddly enough, competition and market forces, taking refuge from the wild epic of cosmic ontogeny by hiding our head in a ledger"

I'm finding these words weaving a spell on me, something akin to reading "On the Road" at 17.  These are routine-busting words, an invitation to explore meaning outside the structures a job, particularly a corporate one, suggests.  The key I imagine is not to discount that reality, but to find a way to balance and integrate it with other ways of making meaning.  Still working those out in my head now, but I'm excited by the prospects for richer experience.

And one more quote that I love from this essay (with a small annotation I couldn't resist):

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do.  I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.  I want to believe that there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.  I miss civilization, and I want it back.

Reading some of the MLK links from an earlier post, I came upon his Nobel acceptance speech. I particularly love this paragraph:

"I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."

A few other amazing speeches--Ernest Hemingway's from 1954, William Faulkner's from 1949.

After what happened to Alexander Litvinenko, I suppose I'd rather not hear what Bush is whispering to Putin.  Anyhow, it makes a nice spooky desktop background.

Learned an excellent new word today from Tuttle SVC.  A verb:  to fisk.  And I agree w/ Tom--the folks at martinlutherking.org need a good fisking.

Adding my two cents for his google bomb:

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm not a big fan of the del.icio.us interface, but this strategy for using firefox's RSS-based live bookmarks in conjunction w/ del.icio.us gives you the benefit of cross-computer shared bookmarks w/o the need to click through to the del.icio.us site.