Unlikely Connections: Beekeeping, Old Houses, and Everything Else

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Nick Pilon
on July 19, 2008
in O'Reilly and technology
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Possibly the best session I attended at FOO Camp was given by Brian Fitzpatrick. Fitz talked about The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping, and tied it together with his experiences with his old house in Chicago and software development.

I’m not going to talk about the talk itself except in the most general terms above (as per FOO Camp policy, I shall only be blogging about publicly-available stuff) but I will talk about my reaction to it, since the whole thing hit very close to home for me.

I’m hasty. I tend to jump into things without thinking or looking. I make rushed decisions, I jump into things, and I tend to constantly strive for better without appreciating what’s there. This is most obvious in my thesis, when I decided not to use NS2 and wrote my own network simulator instead. I learned a hell of a lot, and it honestly probably didn’t take longer, but… Was it the right decision? I’m not sure. I thought at the time that I’d considered all my options carefully, but in retrospect, I think I might’ve jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate my ego. Honestly, I think a lot of software folks are this way - it’s why we’re so bad at code re-use.

The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping is all about the value of observation, contemplation and patience. I’ve been suggesting for a while that our culture needs to learn the value of being slow again - for example, we need to realize that not being able to travel halfway around the world in less than twelve hours is not necessarily bad. But listening to Fitz talk (and joining in the discussion), I realized that I need to learn that I don’t need to do everything at 100% speed. There’s a lot of value to sitting and watching beehives, listening to the bees and learning their behaviors. Before you jump in and start clearing out honey and replacing bits of the hive, you’ve got to learn the feel of what’s already there and what that feel means.

Another interesting thought was that cleanliness isn’t necessarily the highest virtue - things that are messy can still have value. Cleaning them up without pausing to observe them and consider them from different perspectives can inadvertently destroy that value. Yes, working with them in the interim can be annoying, but it’s better than wading in and wrecking things before you grasp the full picture.

I could probably write a small book about the stuff in that session, but I think I’m going to stick to two more little bits. First off, unless you’re writing an RFC, don’t say “should”. Should usually means that you’re coming to a situation with a pre-conceived notion of how it “should” be, making snap value judgments without actually taking the time to observe.

Secondly, “failure scales.” It may sound like a quip, but it’s surprisingly accurate. It’s hard to replicate success, it’s much easier to replicate failures or borderline marginal.

Sage Advice

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Nick Pilon
on July 14, 2008
in comics
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Sally Forth on Powerpoint And this is one of many reasons why Francesco Marciuliano is an underappreciated genius.

The others mostly have to do with his ability to slip Internet pop culture references into a mainstream newspaper comic strip. It’s really a shame he stopped doing Medium Large.


FOO Camp ‘08

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Nick Pilon
on July 14, 2008
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This weekend was FOO Camp ‘08 which I, as an employee of O’Reilly Media, was privileged to attend. And, frankly, wow. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. I missed the sessions on Friday and a couple of the Saturday sessions, but everything I managed to attend was, without exception, astonishing. Over the next week or two, while the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’m going to try to turn my hastily-scribbled notes about the sessions that really stood out for me into coherent blog posts.

First, though, I’d like to mention something I noticed over and over throughout the weekend:

Innovation Isn’t Isolation

I was going to title this section “Developers Don’t Drive Development”, but after thinking about a couple of the sessions that really jumped out at me, I concluded it just wasn’t true. A more accurate statement is that just developers don’t drive development. What I think of as the “old model”, of giving someone a technical education, sitting them down to think really hard, and then turning them loose and getting all kinds of awesome products is gone, and I’m not sure it ever existed. A lot of the coolest things I saw this weekend were things that were created for very non-technical disciplines, and by very non-technical people. It might just have been the sessions I picked - honestly, I did steer away from anything that smelled like it’d fit in at a tech conference - but a lot of the motivators and big new ideas seemed to be coming from humanities and artistic folks. People with non-technical educations, who were taking technology and bending it to their own ends.

I’ve suspected this for a while now, but I was kind of nice to see that I’m not totally out to lunch. How far out to lunch I am remains to be seen. Other opinions along the same lines included:

  • Robert, one of my co-workers, who was utterly floored by a cello performance on Friday night. I’m really sorry I missed it.
  • Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist (seriously, guys, best name ever) was most impressed by what I’m going to call “sewing origami”, for lack of a better term. I can’t remember what Windell Oskay (also of Evil Mad Scientist) was most impressed by - sorry, Windell.
  • Lane Becker was most impressed by a game designer who ran a session I’m really sorry to have missed on Saturday and, on Sunday, had a bunch of people collaboratively build a game in chalk on the concrete between the session-tents.

Next Up: Bees. My god.

Playing Games

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Nick Pilon
on June 28, 2008
in culture and gaming
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Clay Shirky’s post about Gin, Television, and Social Surplus triggered some interesting thoughts about game-playing based on my reading of Rules of Play.

In his discussion of how we’re starting to make use of our cognitive surplus, rather than wasting it on “gin” like TV, Shirky mentions video games. He seems to view video games as a kind of intermediate ground between productive uses of the cognitive surplus, like Wikipedia, and unproductive uses, like watching sit-coms. I disagree; I think video games are an important part of why we’re able to make use of the cognitive surplus, rather than continuing to waste it on gin. In the past, our economy was based almost wholly on physical labour. Games were correspondingly physical, either helping children build up the physical traits they’d need to do their work, like strength and reflexes, or helping them learn rough analogs of the skills they’d be using as adults. For adults, games served a similar role, keeping them in form and practice while letting them relax without the pressures of work.

I think video games serve the same purpose for today’s more intellectually-oriented economy. As Danc is fond of pointing out, one of the more compelling incentives to play video games is the opportunity to explore and understand a dynamic system. In a well-designed game, the player encounters successively more complicated layers of mechanics and interactions between mechanics. One of the challenges posed by the game is untangling these mechanics and building an understanding of how the game works. I view this as a fundamental intellectual skill, one that’s necessary for understanding and working with complex systems. Video games often layer other traits on top of this - situational awareness, teamwork, memorization, quick reactions to rapidly changing circumstances, large- or small-scale organization…

It’s true that not every game player learns to generalize these skills beyond video games, or even between video games. But those that do are better prepared for the requirements of our modern intellectually-focused economy.

The World of Warcraft and the Third Place

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Nick Pilon
on April 27, 2008
in culture
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There’s been a lot of effort and thought put into working out why World of Warcraft has been so much more popular than other MMOs. Most numbers put them at ten times the active subscriptions of their closest competitor, though I don’t know of any that break it down by region. (From my memory of launch dates, I suspect there’s some interesting information buried in the regional break-down) In North America alone, WoW has a reported 2 million subscribers, more than any other MMO since the Lineage games at their peak.

The focus in these analyses of popularity usually tends to emphasize the game mechanics. There is, of course, the psychologically addictive behaviour created by epic loot drops and other intermittent rewards. There’s the sense of progress and development as your character levels or advances through raids. There’s the raid encounters themselves and the extreme commitment required to learn them. But really, none of this stuff is particularly original. It’s not even more smoothly-executed than other contemporary MMOs. Yes, the graphics are friendlier. The interface is slicker. Some of the high-level stuff is more casual-friendly. To some degree, “network externalities” (thank you, Bradford C. Walker) mean that WoW’s popular because WoW’s popular. But based on my experience playing WoW and watching others play WoW, I think this stuff is all a fancy side-show to the real deal.

WoW’s more popular because scattered across all these things, in bits and pieces that add up to a significant whole, is a game that’s much, much better at doing the thing MMOs do best than any of its competitors. It’s better at being a Third Place, an informal venue for socialization.

Continue reading ‘The World of Warcraft and the Third Place’

More on Sharing

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Nick Pilon
on March 4, 2008
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Neil Gaiman made an excellent post the other day that covered, among other things, the effect of sharing on book sales. Entitled More on Free and Suchlike, he responds to a bookseller that accuses him of harming independent booksellers by giving away a book for free online:

The books you sell have “pass-along” rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don’t.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Go read the full thing, it’s really excellent.

He’s got a good follow-up post today too (Born Free), about a program that’s part of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland. As part of World Book Day, £1 book tokens are being distributed to schoolchildren across the UK and Ireland, and a bunch of “World Book Day £1″ books are being published specifically for the occasion. It’s a wonderful promotion, and I encourage everyone go to read his post (from which all of the information in this paragraph is shamelessly lifted) to find out more.

On the Need for a Good Computer Science History Course

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Nick Pilon
on February 28, 2008
in computer science, culture and programming languages
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Software developers spend most of our time re-inventing the wheel. Everyone who works with computer types has run into the “not invented here” and “I can do it better” mentalities, or fallen victim to them themselves. But I think this goes beyond that. Software developers seem, to me, to be wilfully ignorant of past work. Not only do we not know about it, we don’t want to know about it!

Mark Dominus demonstrates one example of this while examining the whole “Design Patterns” mess. The “Design Pattern” movement seems to be unconsciously based on this ignorance of history, through an assumption that modern programming languages are the be-all and end-all of programming languages, and always have been. As Dominus puts it:

If these problems recurred in every language, we might conclude that they were endemic to programming itself. We might not, but it’s hard to say, since if there are any such problems, they have not yet been brought to my attention. Every pattern discovered so far seems to be specific to only a small subset of the world’s languages.

Some awareness of the history of programming languages might produce a slightly greater awareness of the trends Dominus identifies in the history of programming language development. It might help us avoid re-treading the same ground over and over while claiming that we’re exploring new territory. Perhaps we could even focus our attentions on the areas of language development that actually need work?

Another excellent example is this recent article on Internet software patents by Philip Greenspun, who correctly identifies that most modern software “innovation” is rehashing the work of early pioneers. We’re just scaling that work in obvious ways to take advantage of increased system capacity, or making half-cooked implementations of ideas that these pioneers devised in a much more robust form but were unable to follow through with.

Looking back on my computer science degrees, I’m honestly confused about why there wasn’t more history taught. We got a lot of algorithms, mathematics, and mainstream languages (C, C++, Java) thrown at us, but very little history of or context for the things we were learning. Except for Dr. Grundke’s second-year assembly language course and Dr. Cox’s third-year programming languages course, it wasn’t until fourth year courses or graduate work that historical matters were mentioned at all. And even then, no consideration was given to the implications of the history or its influence. It was written off as obsolete, interesting but largely irrelevant. Even in graduate courses, my experience shows a near-exclusive focus on recent history.

Yet Engelbart’s NLS did things that modern computer systems still can’t manage. Modern programming language and environment development seems to put a lot of sweat into developing poor copies of Smalltalk and LISP. Years of time are put into recreating things that our Internet protocols can already do, because the existing programs that implement these protocols don’t. I’m not saying these older solutions didn’t have their flaws, or that there haven’t been original new developments. But the history of these older technologies at least merits study, so we can focus on improving the things they did wrong and take advantage of the things they did right. Unfortunately, many of the students graduating from computer science programs (possibly the vast majority, including many graduate students!) are as completely unaware of this rich history as they are of modern developments.

This is particularly strange to me, because one of the big motivators for my interest in computers was Steven Levy’s Hackers. Levy’s examination of the early days of the computer movement was inspiring and educational. While non-technical, it provided some good examples of what does work (openness) and what doesn’t work (secrecy), which almost certainly shaped my interest in the Free Software movement. Towards the end of the book, he also inadvertently demonstrates the importance of historical awareness by following people who were sure that history was irrelevant. This lack of awareness doomed them to repeat their predecessors’ mistakes, eventually leading to the collapse of their movements, companies, and technology.

I also have to wonder how much influence the proprietary software movement’s had on this mentality. When your ideal model of software development is behind closed doors, you have to pretend that there’s no need for awareness of other technologies, much less awareness of how they work. If you recognize that reading, working with, and building on notable programs and technology written by others  is valuable, the claim that software innovation requires absolute secrecy starts to look a little shaky.

TLDR: what I want to see is a required course - possibly even a full-year course! - on the history of computing. A proper history course, one that critically examines the causes and effects of events, their influence, and forces the students to become aware of these historical pioneers and the technology they developed. Teach them what it did and what it didn’t do. Heck, if it’s feasible, make them use it a little.

The Long Tail and Sharing

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Nick Pilon
on February 16, 2008
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Over the holidays, I was talking about the Amazon Kindle with a friend of mine who’s working on a graduate program in writing and publishing. She and I are both avid readers, but our tastes tend towards things that are fairly obscure, even within the already-obscure genres of science fiction and fantasy. The books we’re interested in are pretty far down what has come to be known as the Long Tail.

The benefits of Internet distribution and exposure to products in the long tail are fairly well-known. A little while back, TorrentFreak had an article about Paulo Coelho, who’s managed to boost sales of foreign translations of his book spectacularly by providing free access online. The Baen Free Library is another great example, as are Girl Genius and Nothing Better. Tor has recently started offering weekly free un-DRM’d PDF downloads of books from their catalogue.

I’m going to focus on something else specifically: sharing. I like talking with friends about entertainment I’ve enjoyed, particularly books. Going over the plot, appreciating pivotal moments, examining our favourite characters, and nerding out over technique is a lot of fun. This is pretty hard to do if they haven’t read the books in question. One can always try to meet people who’ve read the same books, and online discussion groups are great for that, but it’s still not quite the same. So for a while now, I’ve been sharing books with my friends. Obscure stuff, stuff that they wouldn’t normally have read, or would’ve had a hard time finding in a bookstore even if they had wanted to.

Of course, most of them just read the book and go “Yeah, that was nifty”, and we talk about it a bit and that’s that. But for some of them - usually others with “long tail” interests, particularly others that also share - it translates into purchases. Either they buy a copy of the book that they’ve just read, or they buy the author’s next book, or they track down other books from that author and buy them.

I think this is interesting for three reasons:

  1. It’s the same kind of action as “normal” Long Tail Internet-enabled activity - making a product available to a potential customer for free, and seeing an eventual sale as a result. This isn’t anything new. What is new and different, and worthy of note, is that it isn’t the “owner”, the person who’s “allowed” to “give it away” by copyright law, doing the free redistribution. In practice, this is allowed either implicitly or explicitly by most (but not all) Long Tail creators, but I haven’t seen it get a lot of coverage, much less the kind of “front page” coverage “free official downloads” get. Yet I think it’s more important than “free official downloads”.
  2. A lot of digital content devices and services - the Amazon Kindle, Apple’s iPods and iTMS, Nintendo’s Wii, even Microsoft’s supposedly share-friendly Zune - go out of their way to prohibit or restrict user-to-user sharing. This is an unfortunately common attitude, even in places where the creators should know better (IE, webcomics), and I think it misses the entire point of the Long Tail. These creators are trying to give away power and keep it simultaneously, which, as any follower of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan knows, you can’t do unless you’re dead.
  3. I think it’s a powerful sales driver, for the same reason word of mouth marketing is: the personal element. It’s not some random talking head or distant web site that’s recommending the book, it’s one of your friends.
  4. Discussing and analysing culture is an important cultural activity, particularly for creators. If a couple of creators (or aspiring creators, or even interested amateurs) can’t get together and pick apart a work, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to learn from that work. While this might be in the interest of control-obsessed publishers and distributors, it’s most certainly not in the best interests of creators or the public. With a culture that’s moving farther and farther down the Long Tail, sharing becomes an important prerequisite to this discussion and analysis.
  5. It’s not even fair use. Sharing of a book falls under the Doctrine of First Sale. I’ve paid for your book, I have a right to lend it to friends. More often than not, modern digital content technology tries to take away this right. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people were even aware that it is a right. But it is, and we should be doing our best to defend it.

So, in closing, sharing is good for creators, good for audiences, and even good for publishers (more sales!) and should be promoted and encouraged. Most digital content methods are doing their best to prevent it and eliminate it, which is exactly the wrong approach. The people developing these devices, applications, and services that handle digital content should be making sharing content easier, making paying for shared content easier, and do their best to find and promote creators that recognize the strength of sharing.

Digidesign Digi 002 Hardware Flaw

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Nick Pilon
on January 31, 2008
in bugs
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Public Service Announcement: I ran into this flaw when trying to help Jack and Shannon do some recording for their podcast radio plays. It’s apparently well-known, but you have to fiddle a bit with Google to get it to tell you about the problem, since no-one who’s posted about the solution has included verbatim error messages.

The problem appears to be that the power harness used in the Digi 002 is defective. (References: here and here). DigiDesigns will replace the harness for free, but the user has to install it themselves. This isn’t particularly tricky, since they send you complete and easy-to-follow instructions. The tricky part is working out what’s wrong, since there’s no sensible error messages from their software and no clear indication of a hardware error. Even worse, the hardware error is often intermittent, seeming to go away for long periods before returning.

Hardware Symptoms:

  • When the IEEE1394 interface cable is connected, the green link light (on the back of the case, right between the IEEE1394 ports) briefly turns on then immediately turns off again.
  • The Mute light on the front of the case remains lit. No other lights are on. The device is unresponsive.
  • When attempting to establish a connection, the link light blinks on, a click is heard, then the light immediately turns off again. This repeats several times.

Software Symptoms:

  • When starting ProTools LE, the following error message is seen: “Unable to locate Digidesign hardware. Make sure your hardware is connected and turned on. Click “Ok” when the hardware is ready.”

Getting a Replacement Part:

The replacement part is user-serviceable. Call the technical support line (free if you’re under warranty, $3/minute up to $75 or so if you’re not) and describe the problem to them. They should e-mail you a waiver of liability for the user-installed parts. Once you read and agree to that, they’ll mail you a replacement part and instructions for installing it. The part should arrive inside of a week.

Hopefully, this post will be useful to anyone else who runs into this problem.

Sexism and the Third Place

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Nick Pilon
on January 30, 2008
in culture and politics
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Based on the advice of Gavin and the encouragement of Danielle, I’ve been reading The Great Good Place. For the most part, it’s an excellent examination of the disappearance of avenues for casual socialization from modern culture. Except for one thing. Sexism.

Oldenburg places part of the blame on the disappearance of the third place on feminism. While he doesn’t say so directly, he devotes an entire chapter (ironically titled “The Sexes and the Third Place”) to waxing loquacious about traditional male bonding rituals and men’s places, and indirectly condemning feminism and the idea that men and women should associate freely for the disappearance of “third places”. He devotes considerable time to praising the traditional institution of marriage, and men’s third places as an escape from the demands of the work of their second places and the domineering women of their first places. Women, when they’re mentioned at all, are described as “stealing” the traditional male bonding experience for their sisterhood while conspiring to keep men emotionally dependent on them to secure their marriages.

Oldenburg, unfortunately, misses several vital points here, which I’ll deal with in turn behind the fold. Overall, Oldenburg prescribes more sexism as the cure for problems caused by sexism, which is entirely hypocritical as he condemns this very approach in other domains.
Continue reading ‘Sexism and the Third Place’