Nobody knows I'm a dog

Joel’s off software!

spitzen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:29:58 +0000

OK, not really.

But he is hanging up the blogging hat for a while. This is a shame because it seemed to me that Joel Spolsky was one of the really perceptive people out there writing about how software gets made. He didn’t bother too much with getting down in the weeds of programming problems. Instead, he talked about the process of software development and how it fits in business. I think that’s much more important because there’s so much less of that out there. There are a lot of programmers ready to tell you how to engineer your process to the nth degree. There aren’t that many people who can explain when and why software matters. Joel did that.

I don’t blog very often because I don’t often find myself with something to say that somebody else hasn’t already said, usually very well. There are a lot more blogs than there are good bloggers. Most people write the same stuff they see on the blogs they read most often, usually with all the same little touches to try to make themselves distinctive, such as telling us what music they were listening to when they wrote the post. Joel Spolsky tended to be more insightful and less pretentious than that. Good luck to him.

And because irony is very big in blogs:

Now playing: Kitchen Girl by fiddler Leo McDermott

So, isn’t this a security risk

spitzen — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:58:16 +0000

I just read this LA Times story about pilots who work in the United States controlling fighter drones in Afghanistan. And I wondered: This technology – remoting, chat, etc. – all works because we have satellites to connect the United States’ military assets to one another. Your basic, garden-variety terrorists can’t take out something like that, nor can most nations in the world. But what if some of the larger, more sophisticated nations undertook to do so? Nations such as China, Russia could manage this. And it’s not like we can just throw up more of those things overnight.

Isn’t this a security risk? I’m sure there’s all sorts of redundancy for this sort of thing. Still, you got to wonder . . .

Now I can go to Disneyland!

spitzen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:33:48 +0000

Why does the Wall Street Journal tell me the word count at the beginning of their online stories? Is it so I will feel like I’ve accomplished something if I make it to the end?

Good thoughts, bad facts

spitzen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:43:35 +0000

There’s an old guy in my church who likes to send me somewhat jingoistic stuff like this, I suspect because he knows I’ll go find out if it’s true. Here, I think the thoughts are good, but I don’t think so much of the facts.

I read everything skeptically, and I suspect that this probably was originally written during World War II and updated during the Vietnam war, when the average age of a soldier actually was 20. The average age of our servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan is actually 25 (in the course of my research, I also learned that the average age of servicemen in World War II was 27). Both of those figures come from the Veterans Administration, which posted an online study of the costs of treating servicemen injured in the theater of war. The Christian Science Monitor listed the average age of those wounded in Iraq as 26.5.

To me, there’s a big difference between 25 and 20. At 25, you’re old enough to have left behind a family of your own (or, given the times we live in, children whose mother or father you haven’t married). You’re old enough to be putting aside a job, possibly even one you’re beginning to make serious money at. My friend who graduated high school with me to become a plumber’s apprentice became a master plumber at 25 and opened his own business. At 25, you might have a house, a car and the attendant debts to service.

Why were so many kids going to war in Vietnam? Because we drafted them while permitting plenty of exemptions for those who had families, jobs, educations, etc., something we didn’t do so much of in World War II. Now, of course, there is no draft and the people who go to war choose to uproot their lives on our behalf.

I suspected World War II because the piece mentions rifles and foxholes. Servicemen have carried machine guns since Vietnam, something I learned recently while reading a history of the AK-47 by Larry Kahane. As for foxholes, I just suspect servicemen don’t dig them anymore because battle strategies have changed and commanders don’t tie themselves down by building lots of infrastructure like trenches and foxholes (this is a gut feeling; I could stand to be corrected on this, but I’d actually have to meet the guy who dug the foxhole). Also, there were references to jazz and swing. I read not long ago (I don’t remember where, but I wish I did since I’m going to cite the statistic) that only three percent of the music sold in this country is jazz (two percent less than classical). I bet there aren’t a lot of jazz listeners in theater in Iraq and Afghanistan. I bet there aren’t any soldiers listening to swing music. Even the generals are young enough to have listened to second-generation rock ‘n roll growing up.

Because it’s not there

spitzen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:06:20 +0000

In 1971, guitar god Duane Allman did session work on a single cut of jazz flutist (I hate the word flautist) Herbie Mann’s album Push Push. It was a truly electrifying session, marked by an outstanding Afro-Cuban-style rhythm and extraordinary interplay between soloists Mann and Allman.

I don’t expect to find Allman-quality solos on other albums, but I did look endlessly for this rhythmic approach on other Herbie Mann albums. I can’t find anything close to the kind of energy the rhythm section had here. And eventually, it occurred to me. I can’t find anything like this because there is nothing like this. It’s one of a kind. I wonder how many people hear the solos and never hear the rhythm. Obviously, Mann never did. Shame.

The ethical dilemma of the hammer

spitzen — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:21:56 +0000

Eventually, I’ll talk about software. But first, I want you to know that I’ve got a lot of hammers: Your basic claw hammer for whacking things, a super-heavy mallet for whacking things really hard, a rubber mallet for whacking things that you don’t want to look like they’ve been whacked. A tiny hammer that my wife uses. Plus I’ve got a couple of extra hammers that I found in the road (I get a lot of tools this way, actually).

I don’t give the hammers a lot of thought. That’s all. While everyone understands that hammers are tools, the fact that lots of other things in life essentially also are tools can be very hard for some people to take in. To a car enthusiast, a car is so much more than a means of getting from here to there. To designers, clothing approaches a kind of art. Nobody has more trouble seeing their work as nothing more than a tool than software developers. Particularly open source software developers.

OSS advocates devote a lot of time to arguing the merits of using open source software over using closed source stuff like Microsoft’s. Unfortunately, even among the most thoughtful advocates, the argument always basically comes down to choosing open source software because it’s the Right Thing To Do. And it isn’t.

The fact that something is open source is not, in itself, enough reason to use software. The fact that something is free is not, in itself, enough reason to use software. OSS advocates nearly always push the ethical reasons for choosing Linux over Windows, FireFox over IE. People don’t use software because it’s the right thing to do; they use it because it does what they want. OSS advocates often characterize this as people being unwilling to think. Most people are actually quite willing to think. They’re just not willing to care. They’ve already got stuff to care about.

At its core, this is a perfectly capitalistic argument. In the marketplace of ideas, OSS doesn’t have to be a free alternative to close source. It has to be a more appealing alternative to closed source. It doesn’t actually have to be better. If it had to be better, then Microsoft wouldn’t be a player in the browser game in the first place. It just has to be the hammer they need for the job at hand.

Hello world!

spitzen — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:31:33 +0000

Everyone has to start somewhere. I started here.