Interview with Off the Hook/WBAI about Makers
Here's a radio interview I did recently with Off the Hook, the 2600 show, on New York's WBAI, talking about MAKERS, maker politics, and the state of the world. MP3 Link
My Locus column on sex in YA fiction
My latest Locus column, "Teen Sex," explains why I think young adult literature should have sex -- and other "mature" topics -- in it. There's really only one question: "Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don't you punish them for doing this?" Now, the answer. First, because teenagers have [...]
Friday, 6 November 2009
The Doghouse: ADE 651
A divining rod to find explosives in Iraq: ATSC's promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says. To detect materials, the operator puts...
Mossad Hacked Syrian Official's Computer
It was unattended in a hotel room at the time: Israel's Mossad espionage agency used Trojan Horse programs to gather intelligence about a nuclear facility in Syria the Israel Defense Forces destroyed in 2007, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported Monday. According to the magazine, Mossad agents in London planted the malware on the computer of a Syrian official who...
Upgrade your career
Do you like your job? Do you enjoy the people you work with? Would you want to have lunch with them? Every day? Alex Papadimoulis thinks that FogTyler Griffin Hicks-Wright Creek's free lunches are “cultish,” but everyone at Fog Creek loves them. Maybe it's the mandatory brain implant we install in each new worker, but I like to think that we just enjoy eating together because we genuinely like each other and like spending time together. If you can't imagine eating lunch every day with your coworkers, I hate to break it to you: you might not like them. Is it OK to spend most of your waking hours with people you don't like?
The Problems with Unscientific Security
From the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology, by a whole llist of authors: "A Call for Evidence-Based Security Tools": Abstract: Since the 2001 attacks on the twin towers, policies on security have changed drastically, bringing about an increased need for tools that allow for the detection of deception. Many of the solutions offered today, however, lack scientific underpinning. We...
Other Concurrency Sessions at PDC09
I mentioned yesterday that I'll be involved in two sessions at PDC09, including a parallel patterns tutorial. I know many of you are interested in concurrency in general and on Microsoft platforms in particular, so I thought I'd share this more complete list of concurrency-related sessions at PDC, put together by my colleague Stephen Toub. Overview: The [...]
Fear and Overreaction
It's hard work being prey. Watch the birds at a feeder. They're constantly on alert, and will fly away from food -- from easy nutrition -- at the slightest movement or sound. Given that I've never, ever seen a bird plucked from a feeder by a predator, it seems like a whole lot of wasted effort against not very big...
Radical Presentism in Tin House
Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called "Radical Presentism," about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future. Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation [...]
PDC'09: Tutorial & Panel
For those of you coming to PDC'09 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks from now, I'll be there for a few hours on Monday and Wednesday participating in two events: Patterns of Parallel Programming: A Tutorial on Fundamental Patterns and Practices for Parallelism. The full-day tutorial is full of useful information. I'll be giving the [...]
Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?
My new Inc. column is up. “For a guy who wrote a book on how to hire great programmers, it's mortifying how incompetent I've been at enlarging the sales team, which, right now, consists of one terrific account executive and a dog. (I'm just kidding. There's no dog.)” Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Java Store ß: payment and a new client
Put an accountant, a lawyer, an MBA and a software engineer together into a room... Sounds like the lead-in to a bad joke, but it's the exercise that the Java Store team has been living through for the past several months. At the PayPal conference today Eric Klein did an announcement and demo of the next phase in the Java Store's development. We've been working with PayPal on this for some time, using their new PayPal X platform. It always amazes me how complex it is to deal with all the details of global finance. And even so, the store today only handles US issues.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
While checking links, discovered a new firefox page, advertising the new release 3.5. I hope it renders things better than 3.0.4 that I'm using at the moment. Here's firefox rendering its own web pages: It's quite possible that this is a firefox configuration problem, but it's certainly not an obvious one. Wine problems: shm related? Discussing my problems with Ashampoo photo optimizer and wine.
Upcoming Gig – Scottish Ruby
Next March, I'll visit Edinburgh (for the first time!) to keynote the Scottish Ruby Conference, along with the excellent Jim Weirich. Interestingly, this is the former Scotland On Rails; they've decided to broaden their spectrum.
Clojure N00b Tips
Clojure is the new hotness among people who think the JVM is an interesting platform for post-Java languages, and for people who think there's still life in that ol' Lisp beast, and for people who worry about concurrency and state in the context of the multicore future. Over the last few days I've been severely bipolar about Clojure, swinging from “way cool!” to “am I really that stupid?” Herewith some getting-started tips for newbies like me. This is almost certainly not interesting to anyone except those who are already interested in Clojure, and to one other group: those who might want to package up a programming language in such a way that learning it will be straightforward.
Zero-Tolerance Policies
Recent stories have documented the ridiculous effects of zero-tolerance weapons policies in a Delaware school district: a first-grader expelled for taking a camping utensil to school, a 13-year-old expelled after another student dropped a pocketknife in his lap, and a seventh-grader expelled for cutting paper with a utility knife for a class project. Where's the common sense? the editorials cry....
Meta-Microblogging
So I don't tweet because I'm not ready to hand my data and autonomy over to Twitter. Luckily -- or unluckily perhaps -- that hasn't kept me off the microblogging wagon. I "dent" semi-regularly over at freedom-friendly identi.ca. I've found that microblogging is a great public outlet where one can talk about all those otherwise little meaningless things that we all do in our daily lives. High on my list of meaningless little actions, however, is microblogging itself! But can you microblog about your microblogging -- i.e. can you "metamicroblog" (or "metadent", or "metatweet")?
One Size Does Not Fit All
Last week AWS announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and I blogged that it was big step forward for the cloud storage world: Amazon RDS, More Memory, and Lower Prices. This really is an important step forward in that a huge percentage of commercial applications are written to depend upon Relational Databases. But, I was a bit surprised to get a couple of notes asking about the status of Simple DB and whether the new service was a replacement. These questions were perhaps best characterized by the forum thread The End is Nigh for SimpleDB.
Detecting Terrorists by Smelling Fear
Really: The technology relies on recognising a pheromone - or scent signal - produced in sweat when a person is scared. Researchers hope the 'fear detector' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. Terrorists with murder in mind, drug smugglers, or criminals on the run are likely to be very fearful...
Monday, 2 November 2009
I've noted in the past severe performance issues running the Ashampoo photo optimizer, a Microsoft-based program, with wine. They're clearly related to the X interface: it's the X server that uses up all the time, sometimes as much as several seconds just to select a box on the window. The problem just “went away” fairly soon after I installed it—otherwise I probably would have given up—but it has returned a few times recently. Today it took over a minute of X server CPU time for the initial screen to complete building, and the remainder was just as slow. Just for the fun of it, I shot down another resource hog, firefox, and the problem went away.
Epoch, Part 7
Here's the seventh installment of a story-in-progress, Epoch, commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth for my forthcoming short story collection WITH A LITTLE HELP. MP3 Link
The FBI and Wiretaps
To aid their Wall Street investigations, the FBI used DCSNet, their massive surveillance system. Prosecutors are using the FBI's massive surveillance system, DCSNet, which stands for Digital Collection System Network. According to Wired magazine, this system connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It can be used to instantly wiretap almost...
ZFS Deduplication
You knew this day was coming: ZFS now has built-in deduplication. If you already know what dedup is and why you want it, you can skip the next couple of sections. For everyone else, let's start with a little background. What is it? Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level. Chunks of data -- files, blocks, or byte ranges -- are checksummed using some hash function that uniquely identifies data with very high probability. When using a secure hash like SHA256, the probability of a hash collision is about 2^-256 = 10^-77 or, in more familiar notation, 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.
Speaking this week in Cambridge, Sheffield
I'm giving two talks in the UK this week -- the first in Cambridge, as part of the Arcadia Seminar, held at Robinson College; the second is at Sheffield, as part of the DocFest premiere of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyfighting and art that features some interviews with me. Hope to see [...]
Caching Bites Me Again
I'm on a roll. Two weird caching problems in the space of a week. This one started off looking like a scary security bug. During testing, our QA department observed the following sequence of events: Log into the system as user U1. View page P1 Log out Log into the system as user U2. View page that re-directs to P1. At this point, they were indeed on page P1, but it was showing the data from user U1. My first suspicion was that somehow browser cookies were not being cleared and we somehow managing to pick up the sessions cookies from the initial login.
Figuring out what your company is all about
What is your company about? Recently I got inspired by Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users and Head First series of books revolutionized developer education. She kept saying the same thing again and again: help your users be awesome. Kathy taught me that if you can't explain your mission in the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,” you are not going to have passionate users. What's your tagline? Can you fit it into that template? It took us nine years, but we finally worked out what Fog Creek Software is all about, which I'll tell you in a moment, but first, some backstory.
Adam Bosworth on standards
Adam Bosworth: “All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.” Required reading. Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
