Oh, come on, Literate Programming has been around for 30 years! Knuth made exactly this argument in his 1984 essay entitled, surprisingly enough, "Literate Programming!" Wikipedia asserts in it "Literate Programming" entry: "According to Knuth, literate programming provides for higher-quality programs, since it forces programmers to explicitly state the thoughts behind the program, making poorly thought-out design decisions more obvious. Knuth also claims that literate programming provides a first-rate documentation system, which is not an add-on, but is grown naturally in the process of exposition of one's thoughts during a program creation. The resulting documentation allows authors to restart their own thought processes at any later time, and allows other programmers to understand the construction of the program more easily."
Congratulations to Slashdot for posting about some kid rediscovering an ancient technology by a revered master of the craft. What's next? "Snot-nosed highschooler discovers GOTO is a bad idea?"
There are jobs where open source is used as the platform for development and deployment. There are jobs where open source is used, but the company culture is one where "We take, but we never share." And there are jobs where open source is used and the company culture encourages community engagement with the people who provide the platform. I've worked at all of these.
I find that companies with a culture of community engagement get to market faster and survive longer. I worked at a company where I was allowed to send bugfixes, patches, and extensions to Linux drivers, the Python standard library, and the Apache mod_log plugin; it was bought by a bigger company, lawyers got involved, all this "sharing" had to stop-- and the company tanked two years later.
I can understand not wanting to work for a company that has closed its doors to community involvement. But I've worked for a consulting firm that used MS products and contributed what work that wasn't it's core intellectual property back to the community.
If you don't feel that you can be productive in an environment where upper management has decided to lock the doors on core development and contribution, and tells you that your duty is to "work with or around the bugs, frustrations, and so forth" in MS products (I've got your SharePoint Horror Stories right here buddy), and you want to leave... more power to you.
And ignore the whingers who say you should be "grateful you have a job at all." If your corporate master is gonna screw you, screw 'em back and take your experience and skills elsewhere.
My best experience with "open source employment" is to put the things I know on my resume (http://www.elfsternberg.com/resume/), then send the resume out to people who use the tools you know best. Put it on Monster, and update it every two weeks: just deleting it and reposting it will make the recruiters call you. I know: Python, Perl, Django, Rails, Ruby, MySQL, Postgres, S3, EC2, AWS, Git, Subversion, LAMP, and a ton of other things in the end-to-end stack of web development: I can go from having a box of parts and a Gentoo boot disk to a full-sized website with Responsive Design, Database backing both SQL and NoSQL, and Ajax and Socket.IO sexiness in a day.
Also, find the craigslist in your area. Get yourself an RSS reader. For me, the feeds I took from Craigslist were "Web/HTML/Info", "Internet Engineering", "Software/DBA/QA", and "Computer GIGS" (the last is for short-term contracts... I've made $1000 in one day with some of those). Scan them every morning, pull up the interesting ones in your browser, and send them a resume. Have several, tailored to different skillsets, along with cover letters. You might get one hit for every twenty you send out. Also, if you're in a decent-sized city, you might find it has a "startup community." Check their blog-- startups love open source, and they love good talent. They might even have a job feed-- Startuply in Seattle does.
It depends upon how "active" you want it to be. RDF is mostly for the back-end anyway.
As a developer heavily involved in building RDF/RDFA utilities, I can't begin to express just how annoying it is to see a Slashdot header pointing to a "technical blog post" that has absolutely no mention of the technology used: nothing about the libraries or server platforms used; nothing about the trade-offs with client desktop vs mobile vs legacy (IE7 / FF3.x) vs. ARIA (accessibility). If you search through the article, you find a link to another article that says they use Silverlight (WTF!?) to handle their contentEditable stuff, Java as their RDFa store, and PHP as their deployment strategy. It looks like an overpriced, incoherent mess that's already headed for legacy status.
An old idea, floated in the 19th century by highly conservative economists, the capability tax was the idea that people should be taxed based upon what they were capable of earning, rather than what they earned. The idea was to discourage smart people from going into art, the humanities, liberal arts, and so forth, and encourage them to go into meaningful, productive fields, where their capabilities would be put to full use. Whether or not you enjoyed the work was irrelevant, and only liberals cared about that.
The paper is basically encouraging us to think in these term, to ask students to go into fields they may well hate, because that's where they have to go to (1) get a decent education, and (2) make enough to pay off their ultimate student loans.
I've been writing with Coffeescript, HAML, and Stylus for about a year now, and I'm not looking back. Most IE-specific errors these days are parser errors rather than semantic errors, so JS-Lint takes care of that. And you can't use Coffeescript without knowing Javascript, you just can't; too many libraries are written in JS for you to be unable to read them. And Coffeescript has a node.js mode that rocks.
Google has been clamping down on low-quality aggregation sites, as we all know. One way to avoid looking like a low-quality aggregation site is to (a) create a vast farm of low-quality aggregation sites, (b) harvest high-quality articles from other sites, (c) run those articles through Google translate, (d) repost them to your farm. Because they don't look like the originals (being translations) they get around Google's "recognize repeat content" filters. Google uptakes them as original content.
Delicious has been filled with links to these in recent weeks, mostly because Delicious once had a decently high reputation as a site of quality linkage, and lots of people had trust in it.
Okay, I use Emacs. I write in raw text, double-space paragraphs, nothing particularly weird. If I want some formating, some emphasis, I use LaTeX macros in-line. I have a pair of python scripts that convert what I've written in for the past eight years into either LaTeX or HTML. The "toHTML" version is pluggable as a CGI script, so I can preview what my work looks like no the web, while a makefile drives the toLaTeX script to render PDFs. The LaTeX framework I use is sffms (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Manuscript LaTeX toolkit). The only "oddity" is that I've installed wordcount.el. I do my outlines in emacs outline mode. The scripts know how to deal with that.
Other useful tools:
Aspell for a spelling engine. It's much better than Ispell. Rhyme, Style, Diction, and WordNet all make the writer's life simple.
And the best thing about plain text: a remote CVS repository for backups, history, and logs!
Ditto on that. I have a 600E running RedHat 7.3. The battery "smart circuit" is f#%@#%@# insane. It will trigger "Fully Charged" events pretty much at random and I've turned off monitoring that particular event in the apmd. But the percentage indicator is reliable, and I use it. When the battery reaches 100%, I pop it out if I've got wall charge available.
After nine months of this battery discipline, I have noticed no particular loss of functionality. It still lasts nearly three hours on a charge if I'll I'm doing in emacsing.
That said, I shouldn't have to do this manual rigamorale to keep the battery lively.
If you have children... My Neighbor Totoro!
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
For all the love of Hayao Miyazaki out there, I'm stunned nobody has said anything about his best work.
I bought a copy of My Neighbor Totoro the same week that a friend of mine gave me their copy of Disney's "Hunchback of Notre' Dame." The two movies couldn't be more different. Hunchback is a dark, nasty movie with a violent and ambiguous moral ending. "The Matrix" had a better ending than this did.
"My Neighbor Totoro," on the other hand, is absolutely delightful flick about two young girls trying to deal with their mother being in the hospital. They have all kinds of adventures in an old rickety house their father moves them to to be close to the hospital. They meet an imaginary forest spirit named "Totoro" who may or may not be "all a dream."
It's gentle, friendly, and has a wonderful moral message without beating you over the head with it like some other kids' flicks.
As my wife cynically observed, "If Disney had made this movie, Mom would have been cured by the end of it after Totoro battled the evil causing her cancer in a storm filled with thunder, lightning, and a singing, dancing chorus!" Instead, we got something wonderful.
Totoro in for ages 3 and up, although parents can enjoy it because it doesn't treat its audience like idiots.
Also, for ages 8 and up, Studio Ghibli has "Kiki's Delivery Service." Another great story, well worth it.
Between 1945 and 1959, the United States conducted some 600 above-ground nuclear tests, utilizing some 22,000 pounds of plutonium in the process. A nuclear explosion is not a very efficient process; only between 8 and 12% of the fuel in the bomb is actually converted in the process. The rest is vaporized by the explosion and cast into the atmosphere, to settle out downwind as fallout.
That means that some 9,000 pounds of metallic plutonium has been circulating in our atmosphere for some decades now. We apparently survived, although how well is a matter of debate.
The 72 pounds of ceramic plutonium on board Cassini is a pittance in comparison and is chemically much harder to incorporate into the body than the metallic form.
Let's put it this way. If I ate a teaspoon of what Cassini is carrying, I'd stand a slightly elevated chance of colon cancer some twenty years down the line. If, at the same time, you ate a teaspoon of a completely legal substance, nicotine, you'd be dead in minutes of a heart attack.
"A bad review from Linus could be the kiss of death..."
I doubt it. Linus is good at what he does but there's a difference between thinking up and executing good code and choosing the tools with which to do that. Alan Cox and Linus were far apart on their development environment of choice.
I use Xemacs, TCSH, Gnu make and CVS for my environment-- they're what I know. Moving to something else after learning those wouldn't increase my productivity until I'd overcome yet another learning curve.
Last night, while flipping through the 100+ channels available to me on satellite, I came across the terrifiying visage of Jerry Falwell bemoaning the "death culture" of Amerian teenagers. As he nattered on about the evil of videogames, the screen shifted to a video of Quake2.
I switched to the Dvorak layout about a year ago and I'm still getting the hang of it. Part of the problem is that I broke by right hand when very young and my right pinky (pinkie?) isn't as strong as it needs to be to hit the 's' and 'l' keys with complete effectiveness. What really ticks me off, though, is that all of the major symbols Perl, C, and C++ coders use are also off that one finger.
It's made programming a lot more uncomfortable for me, and I'm not sure if it works for anyone else as well. If you touch-type, it's great-- this post is a breeze to respond to. But it can't be just my handicap-- has anyone else who codes in Perl or C noticed just how annoyingly the '{' and '}' are placed? It's enough to make me want to remap the keyboard again.
Look, he isn't tasking about just the government. He's talking about EVERYTHING-- the information collected about you on the 'net, the way banks "datamine" your credit card information to sell you "targeted" material, the way information brokerages know your entire history of buying and selling. With a powerful enough engine, someone could put together an intersection of data about you that would lay out your whole damn life.
Now, do you:
(a) demand the status quo, in which only those with money have access to the databases. This gives you the illusion of privacy (your next door neighbor can't find out what's in those databases). Unfortunately, it also means that corporations and governments now control, if not your ass individually, then the collective ass of those around you. They can, through old-fashioned "target" advertising, affect enough people to vote one way or the other, to buy MS over anything else, and to make you think that freedom of speech is a dangerous thing.
(b) Demand that the databases be opened up? This grants you the freedom to decide for yourself how the information about you is used, and gives you the power to organize grass roots opposition, now that you know who the enemy may be. (It also presupposes an Internet anyone can participate in, as opposed to (a), in which the powers that be come to control the Internet, selling this control to the majority by arguing that it 'safer', 'better', 'faster' that way.) This does destroy any illusions of privacy you might have had.
In David Brin's book, "The Transparent Society," (an excerpt of which appeared in Wired) he basically argues in the same vein as McNealy: There is nothing you can do to prevent companies for acquiring information about you.
Brin argues that there are only two possible futures. In the first, only the corporations have direct access to the information and the techniques with which to mine it. In the second, everybody has access to that information. The first grants us the illusion of privacy but effectively strips us of our freedom-- you can't know our neighbor's kinks but corporations know exactly what floats your boat. The second strips away any illusion of privacy, but grants you the real freedom to decide for yourself the information you take in and put out.
The question now becomes, do we act to ensure this illusory privacy, or do we demand that you and I have access to the same information those with money and power collect about us? Which do you want? A review of The Transparent Society can be found in Business Week.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on, Literate Programming has been around for 30 years! Knuth made exactly this argument in his 1984 essay entitled, surprisingly enough, "Literate Programming!" Wikipedia asserts in it "Literate Programming" entry: "According to Knuth, literate programming provides for higher-quality programs, since it forces programmers to explicitly state the thoughts behind the program, making poorly thought-out design decisions more obvious. Knuth also claims that literate programming provides a first-rate documentation system, which is not an add-on, but is grown naturally in the process of exposition of one's thoughts during a program creation. The resulting documentation allows authors to restart their own thought processes at any later time, and allows other programmers to understand the construction of the program more easily."
Congratulations to Slashdot for posting about some kid rediscovering an ancient technology by a revered master of the craft. What's next? "Snot-nosed highschooler discovers GOTO is a bad idea?"
There's no such thing as an "open source job."
There are jobs where open source is used as the platform for development and deployment. There are jobs where open source is used, but the company culture is one where "We take, but we never share." And there are jobs where open source is used and the company culture encourages community engagement with the people who provide the platform. I've worked at all of these.
I find that companies with a culture of community engagement get to market faster and survive longer. I worked at a company where I was allowed to send bugfixes, patches, and extensions to Linux drivers, the Python standard library, and the Apache mod_log plugin; it was bought by a bigger company, lawyers got involved, all this "sharing" had to stop-- and the company tanked two years later.
I can understand not wanting to work for a company that has closed its doors to community involvement. But I've worked for a consulting firm that used MS products and contributed what work that wasn't it's core intellectual property back to the community.
If you don't feel that you can be productive in an environment where upper management has decided to lock the doors on core development and contribution, and tells you that your duty is to "work with or around the bugs, frustrations, and so forth" in MS products (I've got your SharePoint Horror Stories right here buddy), and you want to leave... more power to you.
And ignore the whingers who say you should be "grateful you have a job at all." If your corporate master is gonna screw you, screw 'em back and take your experience and skills elsewhere.
My best experience with "open source employment" is to put the things I know on my resume (http://www.elfsternberg.com/resume/), then send the resume out to people who use the tools you know best. Put it on Monster, and update it every two weeks: just deleting it and reposting it will make the recruiters call you. I know: Python, Perl, Django, Rails, Ruby, MySQL, Postgres, S3, EC2, AWS, Git, Subversion, LAMP, and a ton of other things in the end-to-end stack of web development: I can go from having a box of parts and a Gentoo boot disk to a full-sized website with Responsive Design, Database backing both SQL and NoSQL, and Ajax and Socket.IO sexiness in a day.
Also, find the craigslist in your area. Get yourself an RSS reader. For me, the feeds I took from Craigslist were "Web/HTML/Info", "Internet Engineering", "Software/DBA/QA", and "Computer GIGS" (the last is for short-term contracts... I've made $1000 in one day with some of those). Scan them every morning, pull up the interesting ones in your browser, and send them a resume. Have several, tailored to different skillsets, along with cover letters. You might get one hit for every twenty you send out. Also, if you're in a decent-sized city, you might find it has a "startup community." Check their blog-- startups love open source, and they love good talent. They might even have a job feed-- Startuply in Seattle does.
Good luck finding a new job.
It depends upon how "active" you want it to be. RDF is mostly for the back-end anyway.
As a developer heavily involved in building RDF/RDFA utilities, I can't begin to express just how annoying it is to see a Slashdot header pointing to a "technical blog post" that has absolutely no mention of the technology used: nothing about the libraries or server platforms used; nothing about the trade-offs with client desktop vs mobile vs legacy (IE7 / FF3.x) vs. ARIA (accessibility). If you search through the article, you find a link to another article that says they use Silverlight (WTF!?) to handle their contentEditable stuff, Java as their RDFa store, and PHP as their deployment strategy. It looks like an overpriced, incoherent mess that's already headed for legacy status.
An old idea, floated in the 19th century by highly conservative economists, the capability tax was the idea that people should be taxed based upon what they were capable of earning, rather than what they earned. The idea was to discourage smart people from going into art, the humanities, liberal arts, and so forth, and encourage them to go into meaningful, productive fields, where their capabilities would be put to full use. Whether or not you enjoyed the work was irrelevant, and only liberals cared about that.
The paper is basically encouraging us to think in these term, to ask students to go into fields they may well hate, because that's where they have to go to (1) get a decent education, and (2) make enough to pay off their ultimate student loans.
Hell, yeah.
I've been writing with Coffeescript, HAML, and Stylus for about a year now, and I'm not looking back. Most IE-specific errors these days are parser errors rather than semantic errors, so JS-Lint takes care of that. And you can't use Coffeescript without knowing Javascript, you just can't; too many libraries are written in JS for you to be unable to read them. And Coffeescript has a node.js mode that rocks.
SEO abuse is certainly one of them.
Google has been clamping down on low-quality aggregation sites, as we all know. One way to avoid looking like a low-quality aggregation site is to (a) create a vast farm of low-quality aggregation sites, (b) harvest high-quality articles from other sites, (c) run those articles through Google translate, (d) repost them to your farm. Because they don't look like the originals (being translations) they get around Google's "recognize repeat content" filters. Google uptakes them as original content.
Delicious has been filled with links to these in recent weeks, mostly because Delicious once had a decently high reputation as a site of quality linkage, and lots of people had trust in it.
Okay, I use Emacs. I write in raw text, double-space paragraphs, nothing particularly weird. If I want some formating, some emphasis, I use LaTeX macros in-line. I have a pair of python scripts that convert what I've written in for the past eight years into either LaTeX or HTML. The "toHTML" version is pluggable as a CGI script, so I can preview what my work looks like no the web, while a makefile drives the toLaTeX script to render PDFs. The LaTeX framework I use is sffms (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Manuscript LaTeX toolkit). The only "oddity" is that I've installed wordcount.el. I do my outlines in emacs outline mode. The scripts know how to deal with that.
Other useful tools:
Aspell for a spelling engine. It's much better than Ispell. Rhyme, Style, Diction, and WordNet all make the writer's life simple.
And the best thing about plain text: a remote CVS repository for backups, history, and logs!
Ditto on that. I have a 600E running RedHat 7.3. The battery "smart circuit" is f#%@#%@# insane. It will trigger "Fully Charged" events pretty much at random and I've turned off monitoring that particular event in the apmd. But the percentage indicator is reliable, and I use it. When the battery reaches 100%, I pop it out if I've got wall charge available.
After nine months of this battery discipline, I have noticed no particular loss of functionality. It still lasts nearly three hours on a charge if I'll I'm doing in emacsing.
That said, I shouldn't have to do this manual rigamorale to keep the battery lively.
For all the love of Hayao Miyazaki out there, I'm stunned nobody has said anything about his best work.
I bought a copy of My Neighbor Totoro the same week that a friend of mine gave me their copy of Disney's "Hunchback of Notre' Dame." The two movies couldn't be more different. Hunchback is a dark, nasty movie with a violent and ambiguous moral ending. "The Matrix" had a better ending than this did.
"My Neighbor Totoro," on the other hand, is absolutely delightful flick about two young girls trying to deal with their mother being in the hospital. They have all kinds of adventures in an old rickety house their father moves them to to be close to the hospital. They meet an imaginary forest spirit named "Totoro" who may or may not be "all a dream."
It's gentle, friendly, and has a wonderful moral message without beating you over the head with it like some other kids' flicks.
As my wife cynically observed, "If Disney had made this movie, Mom would have been cured by the end of it after Totoro battled the evil causing her cancer in a storm filled with thunder, lightning, and a singing, dancing chorus!" Instead, we got something wonderful.
Totoro in for ages 3 and up, although parents can enjoy it because it doesn't treat its audience like idiots.
Also, for ages 8 and up, Studio Ghibli has "Kiki's Delivery Service." Another great story, well worth it.
Between 1945 and 1959, the United States conducted some 600 above-ground nuclear tests, utilizing some 22,000 pounds of plutonium in the process. A nuclear explosion is not a very efficient process; only between 8 and 12% of the fuel in the bomb is actually converted in the process. The rest is vaporized by the explosion and cast into the atmosphere, to settle out downwind as fallout.
That means that some 9,000 pounds of metallic plutonium has been circulating in our atmosphere for some decades now. We apparently survived, although how well is a matter of debate.
The 72 pounds of ceramic plutonium on board Cassini is a pittance in comparison and is chemically much harder to incorporate into the body than the metallic form.
Let's put it this way. If I ate a teaspoon of what Cassini is carrying, I'd stand a slightly elevated chance of colon cancer some twenty years down the line. If, at the same time, you ate a teaspoon of a completely legal substance, nicotine, you'd be dead in minutes of a heart attack.
Elf Sternberg
"A bad review from Linus could be the kiss of death..."
I doubt it. Linus is good at what he does but there's a difference between thinking up and executing good code and choosing the tools with which to do that. Alan Cox and Linus were far apart on their development environment of choice.
I use Xemacs, TCSH, Gnu make and CVS for my environment-- they're what I know. Moving to something else after learning those wouldn't increase my productivity until I'd overcome yet another learning curve.
Elf
Last night, while flipping through the 100+ channels available to me on satellite, I came across the terrifiying visage of Jerry Falwell bemoaning the "death culture" of Amerian teenagers. As he nattered on about the evil of videogames, the screen shifted to a video of Quake2.
The caption identified it as "Quest II".
Let's remind these people to check their facts.
I switched to the Dvorak layout about a year ago and I'm still getting the hang of it. Part of the problem is that I broke by right hand when very young and my right pinky (pinkie?) isn't as strong as it needs to be to hit the 's' and 'l' keys with complete effectiveness. What really ticks me off, though, is that all of the major symbols Perl, C, and C++ coders use are also off that one finger.
It's made programming a lot more uncomfortable for me, and I'm not sure if it works for anyone else as well. If you touch-type, it's great-- this post is a breeze to respond to. But it can't be just my handicap-- has anyone else who codes in Perl or C noticed just how annoyingly the '{' and '}' are placed? It's enough to make me want to remap the keyboard again.
Elf Sternberg
Look, he isn't tasking about just the government. He's talking about EVERYTHING-- the information collected about you on the 'net, the way banks "datamine" your credit card information to sell you "targeted" material, the way information brokerages know your entire history of buying and selling. With a powerful enough engine, someone could put together an intersection of data about you that would lay out your whole damn life.
Now, do you:
(a) demand the status quo, in which only those with money have access to the databases. This gives you the illusion of privacy (your next door neighbor can't find out what's in those databases). Unfortunately, it also means that corporations and governments now control, if not your ass individually, then the collective ass of those around you. They can, through old-fashioned "target" advertising, affect enough people to vote one way or the other, to buy MS over anything else, and to make you think that freedom of speech is a dangerous thing.
(b) Demand that the databases be opened up? This grants you the freedom to decide for yourself how the information about you is used, and gives you the power to organize grass roots opposition, now that you know who the enemy may be. (It also presupposes an Internet anyone can participate in, as opposed to (a), in which the powers that be come to control the Internet, selling this control to the majority by arguing that it 'safer', 'better', 'faster' that way.) This does destroy any illusions of privacy you might have had.
Your choice.
Brin argues that there are only two possible futures. In the first, only the corporations have direct access to the information and the techniques with which to mine it. In the second, everybody has access to that information. The first grants us the illusion of privacy but effectively strips us of our freedom-- you can't know our neighbor's kinks but corporations know exactly what floats your boat. The second strips away any illusion of privacy, but grants you the real freedom to decide for yourself the information you take in and put out.
The question now becomes, do we act to ensure this illusory privacy, or do we demand that you and I have access to the same information those with money and power collect about us? Which do you want? A review of The Transparent Society can be found in Business Week.
Elf Sternberg