Source blog: ongoing
New Amplification
The less interesting part of the story is that my big home stereo has new amplification: Tiny Class-D Monoblocks! (Terminology explained below.) More interesting, another audiophile tenet has been holed below the waterline by Moore?s Law. This is a good thing, both for people who just want good sound to be cheaper, and for deranged audiophiles like me. Tl;dr This was going to be a short piece, but it got out of control. So, here?s the deal: Audiophiles who love good sound and are willing to throw money at the problem should now throw almost all of it at the pure-analog pieces: Speakers.
Standing on High Ground
That?s the title of a book coming out October 29th that has my name on the cover. The subtitle is ?Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain?. It?s an anthology; I?m both an author and co-editor. The other authors are people who, like me, were arrested resisting the awful ?TMX? Trans Mountain pipeline project. Pulling together a book with 25 contributing authors is a lot of work! One of the contributions started out as a 45-minute phone conversation, transcribed by me. The others manifested in a remarkable melange of styles, structures, and formats. Which is what makes it fun.
0 dependencies!
Here?s a tiny little done-in-a-couple-hours project consisting of a single static Web page and a cute little badge you can slap on your GitHub project. The Web site is at 0dependencies.dev. The badge is visible on my current open-source projects, for example check out Topfew (you have to scroll down a bit). Zero, you say? In recent months I keep seeing these eruptions of geek angst about the fulminating masses of dependencies squirming under the surface of just about any software anyone uses for anything. The most recent, and what precipitated this, was Mike Perham?s Kill Your Dependencies.
Long Links
It?s been a while. Between 2020 and mid-2023, I wrote pretty regular ?Long Links? posts, curating links to long-form pieces that I thought were good and I had time to read all of because, unlike my readers, I was lightly employed. Well, then along came my Uncle Sam gig, then fun Open Source with Topfew and Quamina, then personal turmoil, and I?ve got really a lot of browser tabs that I thought I?d share one day. That day is today. Which is to say that some of these are pretty old.
Q Numbers Redux Explained
[The first guest post in some years. Welcome, Arne Hormann!] Hi there, I'm Arne. In July, I stumbled on a lobste.rs link (thanks, Carlana) that led me to Tim?s article on Q Numbers. As I'm regularly working with both floating point numbers and Go, the post made me curious???I was sure I could improve the compression scheme. I posted comments. Tim liked my idea and challenged me to create a PR. I did the encoding but felt overwhelmed with the integration. Tim took over and merged it. And since v1.4.0 released in August 28th, it's in Quamina.
Q Numbers Redux
Back in July I wrote about Q numbers, which make it possible to compare numeric values using a finite automaton. It represented a subset of numbers as 14-hex-digit strings. In a remarkable instance of BDD (Blog-Driven Development, obviously) Arne Hormann and Axel Wagner figured out a way to represent all 64-bit floats in at most ten bytes of UTF-8 and often fewer. This feels nearly miraculous to me; read on for heroic bit-twiddling. Numbits Arne Hormann worked out how to rearrange the sign, exponent and mantissa that make up a float?s 64 bits into a big-endian integer that you probably couldn?t do math with but you can compare for equality and ordering.
Mozart Requiem
Vancouver has many choirs, with differing proficiency levels and repertoire choices. Most gather fall-to-spring and take the summer off. Thus, Summerchor, which aggregates a couple of hundred singers from many choirs to tackle one of the Really Big choral pieces each August. This year it was the Mozart Requiem. Mozart died while writing this work and there are many ?completions? by other composers. Consider just the Modern completions; this performance was of Robert Levin?s. Summerchor performs Mozart?s Requiem in St.Andrews-Wesley United Church, August 24, 2024.
2024 Pollscrolling
The 2024 US election has, in the last few weeks, become the most interesting one I can recall. I?m pretty old, so that?s a strong statement; I can recall a lot of US elections. The Internet makes it way too easy to obsess over a story that?s this big and has this many people sharing opinions. Here is my opinion, not on who?s winning, but on how, with only a very moderate expenditure of time and money, you can be as well-informed as anybody in the world as to how it?s going. Disclosures: I?m not American, got no vote on this one.
Basic Infrastructure
Recently, I was looking at the infrastructure bills for our CoSocial co-op member-owned Mastodon instance, mostly Digital Ocean and a bit of AWS. They seemed too high for what we?re getting. Which makes me think about the kind of infrastructure that a decentralized social network needs, and how to get it. I worked at AWS for 5½ years and part of my job was explaining why public-cloud infrastructure is a good idea. I had no trouble doing that because, for the people who are using it, it was (and is) a good idea.
Countrywomen
In the last couple of weeks I?ve been at shows by Molly Tuttle and Sierra Ferrell (I recommend clicking both those links just for the front-page portraits). Herewith thoughts on the genres, performances, and sound quality. Tuttle is post-bluegrass and Ferrell is, um, well, Wikipedia says ?folk, bluegrass, gypsy jazz, and Latin styles? which, OK, I guess, but it doesn?t mention pure old-fashioned country, her strongest flavor. These days, ?Americana? is used to describe both these artists. The notion that Americana implies ?by white people? is just wrong, check out Rhiannon Giddens?
Invisible Attackers
In the last few days we?ve had an outburst of painful, intelligent, useful conversation about racism and abuse in the world of Mastodon and the Fediverse. I certainly learned things I hadn?t known, and I?m going to walk you through the recent drama and toss in ideas on how to improve safety. For me, the story started back in early 2023 when Timnit Gebru (the person fired by Google for questioning the LLM-is-great orthodoxy, co-author of Stochastic Parrots) shouted loudly and eloquently that her arrival on Mastodon was greeted by a volley of racist abuse.
Union of Finite Automata
In building Quamina, I needed to compute the union of two finite automata (FAs). I remembered from some university course 100 years ago that this was possible in theory, so I went looking for the algorithm, but was left unhappy. The descriptions I found tended to be hyper-academic, loaded with mathematical notation that I found unhelpful, and didn?t describe an approach that I thought a reasonable programmer would reasonably take. The purpose of this ongoing entry is to present a programmer-friendly description of the problem and of the algorithm I adopted, with the hope that some future developer, facing the same problem, will have a more satisfying search experience.
Terse Directions
This post describes a service I want from my online-map provider. I?d use it all the time. Summary: When I?m navigating an area I already know about, don?t give me turn-by-turn, just give me a short list of the streets to take. I?ve been living in Vancouver for decades and, driving or cycling, know how to get almost anywhere. It helps that, like most North American cities, we have a fairly regular north-south-east-west grid. These days, when I?m going any distance by car, I get directions from Google Maps because it knows where the traffic is bad, and the traffic is usually bad somewhere.
2009 Ranger
This week we?re vacationing at the family cabin on an island; the nearest town is Gibsons. Mid-week, we hit town to pick up groceries and hardware. Unfortunately, it?s a really demanding walk from the waterfront to the mall, particularly with a load to carry, and there?s little public transit. Fortunately, there?s Coast Car Co-op, a competent and friendly little five-car outfit. We booked a couple of hours and the closest vehicle was a 2009 Ford Ranger, described as a ?compact pickup? or ?minitruck?. It made me think.
Q Numbers
This ongoing fragment describes how to match and compare numbers using a finite automaton, which involves transforming them into strings with the right lexical properties. My hope is that there are at least twelve people in the world who are interested in the intersection of numeric representation and finite automata. Background (Feel free to skip this part if you already know about Quamina.) This is yet another entry in the Quamina Diary series of blog posts. Quamina is a Go-language library that allows you to compile a bunch of ?Patterns? together and, when presented with ?events?, i.e.
Lounge Penguin
Lounge, as in a jazz club. Penguin, as in GoGo Pengin, a piano/bass/drums trio. We caught their show at Jazz Alley in Seattle last week. Maybe you should go hit a jazz lounge sometime. What happened was My daughter turned eighteen and graduated high school. She had heard that Car Seat Headrest was playing Seattle?s Woodland Park Zoo, and could tickets and a road trip (me buying and driving) be her present? Seemed reasonable, and she found a friend to take along. I wouldn?t mind seeing the Headrests (decent indie rock stuff) but her party, her friend.
Epsilon Love
Quamina was for a time my favorite among all my software contributions. But then it stalled after I shipped 1.0 in January of 2023. First of all, I got busy with the expert witness for Uncle Sam gig and second, there was a horrible problem in there that I couldn?t fix. Except for now I have! And I haven?t done much codeblogging recently. So, here are notes on nondeterministic finite automata, epsilon transitions, Ken Thompson, Golang generics, and prettyprinting. If some subset of those things interests you, you?ll probably like this. (Warning: if you?ve already had your hands on the theory and practice of finite automata, this may all be old hat.)
Wikipedia Pain
There are voices???some loud and well-respected???who argue that Wikipedia is deeply flawed, a hellscape of psychotic editors and contempt for expertise. I mostly disagree, but those voices deserve, at least, to be heard. [Note: There?s a companion blog post, Sex Edit War!, about my own experience in a Wikipedia Edit War. (I won! It was fun!) I hope it?ll make some of this narrative more concrete.] Background If you look at this post?s Reference Publishing topic, you?ll see a lot of Wikipedia-related material. I was one of its early defenders against the early-days waves of attackers who compared it to a public toilet and its editors to the Khmer Rouge.
Sex Edit War!
In January 2010 I drove twenty-five minutes across Vancouver to the University of British Columbia?s main library, with the goal of crushing an opponent in a Wikipedia edit war. The battleground was the entry on T.E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia). I won that war. As a consequence, I consider myself the world?s leading living expert on Lawrence?s sexuality. [Note: This is posted alongside Wikipedia Pain, which is about the issues of truth and expertise in Wikipedia editing, in an effort to share what the process feels like from the inside.]
Parable of the Sofa
When Lauren was pregnant with a child who?s now turning 25, we purchased a comfy dark-brown leather sofa which fits our living room nicely. What with kids and relatives and employees and cats and Standards Comittees and friends and book clubs and socials, the butt-support cushions had, a quarter century later, worn out. So we had them replaced, at a fair price, by a small local business. Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible. I?ll be honest; when we realized how ratty the sofa was getting, my first thought was ?crap, gonna have to buy a sofa?.
Tedeschi Trucks
Saturday night we went a concert by the Tedeschi Trucks Band (TTB). It was excellent and this is partly a review, but mostly a challenge to the community of touring musicians: ?Why aren?t your production values as good as TTB?s?? Just the Facts TTB lives squarely in the middle of the Southern Rock genre, as invented by the Allman Brothers in 1970 or so. Derek Trucks is the nephew of the Allmans? original drummer Butch Trucks and performed in a later iteration of that band. Susan Tedeschi had a successful career as a touring and recording blueswoman.
The Colors of Racism
Recently, somewhat by accident, I stumbled into reading a couple of monstrously racist texts, and I?m going to need to update the Wikipedia entry for a famous British author. But I learned a few things along the way that I want to share. Disclosure I try to be antiracist, but I don?t think I?m particularly good at it. I sometimes have bigoted feelings but try hard to recognize and not act on them. I?m convinced that humans are naturally tribal and antiracist work will continue to be required for the foreseeable future.
Storage Churn
What are the highest-impact Cloud services? Storage would be near the top of any list. Where by ?Storage? I mean what S3 does: Blobs-of-bytes storage that is effectively unlimited in capacity, credibly more durable than anything you could build yourself, and easily connected to the world, either directly or through a CDN. I think we?re entering a period of churn where there?s going to be serious competition on storage price and performance. Which, by the way, is crucially relevant to the Fediverse. Let?s start with AWS, since they invented the modern Storage concept. The most important thing about S3 is this: There appear to be zero credible reports of S3 data loss.
Photointegrity
In March of 2004, just over twenty years ago, I published an ongoing piece entitled, like this one, ?Photointegrity?. The issue remains the same, but the rise of AI increases its importance and its difficulty. Here are words on the subject, illustrated by photos all of which have been processed with AI technology. Tulip blossom, captured with twenty-year old analog technology, enhanced with AI. There?s an amusing story about the technology behind these flower pictures, down at the bottom of this piece. Back in 2004 I was already using Photoshop but in fully-autodidactic mode, so I thought I should read a book about it, and selected one by Scott Kelby, ?The Photoshop guy?
Mobile Typing Pain
I ran a Fediverse poll asking how people go about entering text on mobile devices. The results shocked me: Half the population just taps away. Do you? Read on for details and speculation. This ongoing fragment embeds links to previous fragments, because I?ve been worrying and writing about this problem for a long time. Which in itself is interesting, more evidence that the problem is hard. The poll post and (long) chainof responses are here on Mastodon. People care First, 3.5K poll responses is more than I usually see on the Fediverse; evidence that plenty of people have feelings about this.
Meta.ai Oh My!
?Meet Your New Assistant? says the announcement, going on with ?Built With Llama 3?. And oh my goodness has it ever got a lot of coverage. So I thought I might as well try it. My first cut was a little unfair; I asked it about a subject on which I am unchallenged as the world?s leading expert: Tim Bray. (That?s probably overstating it: My wife is clearly in the running.) So I asked meta.ai ?What does Tim Bray think of Google?? Twice; once on my phone while first exploring the idea, and again later on my computer.
Topfew Release 0.5
Back in 2021-22, I wrote a series of blog posts about a program called ?topfew? (tf from your shell command-line). It finds the field values (or combinations of values) which appear most often in a stream of records. I built it to explore large-scale data crunching in Go, and to investigate how performance compared to Rust. There was plentiful input, both ideas and code, from Dirkjan Ochtman and Simon Fell. Anyhow, I thought I was finished with it but then I noticed I was using the tf command more days than not, and I have pretty mainstream command-line needs.
OSQI
I propose the formation of one or more ?Open Source Quality Institutes?. An OSQI is a public-sector organization that employs software engineers. Its mission would be to improve the quality, and especially safety, of popular Open-Source software. Why? The XZ Utils backdoor (let?s just say #XZ) launched the train of thought that led me to this idea. If you read the story, it becomes obvious that the key vulnerability wasn?t technical, it was the fact that a whole lot of Open-Source software is on the undermaintained-to-neglected axis, because there?s no business case for paying people to take care of it.
A057X
Yes, ?A057X? is cryptic, but my new lens?s official monicker is ?150-500mm F/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD? so let?s stick with that part number. It?s from Tamron and this is the Fujifilm X-Mount variation. Lens-geeking is my favorite part of photo-geeking and it?s great that more manufacturers are opening up to third-party lens builders. Last May I wrote that I wanted a big-ass super-telephoto and now I have one. Let?s start with a little comparo. Here is (roughly) the same 2km-away landscape shot on the decades-old Tokina 400mm I?d been using since 2009, and on the new Tamron.
Bye, Allyson
She?s gone. She lived well. We?ll miss her. We?ve known Ms McGrane since 2005, when she was a co-conspirator on the wonderful little local Northern Voice blogging conference. We worked on other stuff together and hung out now and then and carpooled to the Prairies once and I can?t remember ever getting the slightest bit upset with her. Ally (rhymes with ?valley?) was a fine dog-parent and a strong grant-writer and a first-rate teacher and a connoisseur of fine cooking equipment and Canadian football. If you?ve been to much in the way of Vancouver theatre and dance events over the years, there?s a good chance that she produced the event or secured its funding or educated the people who did those things.
Play My Music
When I?m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that?s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement. The former Google Play Music, now YouTube Music, allowed you to load your tunes into the cloud and play them back wherever your phone or computer happened to be.
The De-Google Project
My family, like most, depends on a lot of online services. And again like most, a lot of those services come from Big Tech giants in general and (in our case) Google in particular. And like many people, we are becoming less comfortable with that. So I?m going to try to be systematic about addressing the problem. This post summarizes our dependencies and then I?ll post blog pieces about updates as I work my way through the list. (The first is already posted, see below.) I?m calling this the ?De-Google? project because they?re our chief supplier of this stuff and it?s more euphonious than ?De-BigTechInGeneral?.
Money Bubble
I think I?m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two. It?s partly AI?s fault, but not mostly. Nonetheless I?m mostly going to write about AI, because it intersects the technosphere, where I?ve lived for decades. I?ve given up having a regular job. The family still has income but mostly we?re harvesting our savings, built up over decades in a well-paid profession. Which means that we are, willy-nilly, investors. And thus aware of the fever-dream finance landscape that is InvestorWorld. The Larger Bubble Put in the simplest way: Things have been too good for too long in InvestorWorld: low interest, high profits, the unending rocket rise of the Big-Tech sector, now with AI afterburners.
Social Photos
I like taking pictures, and I like sharing pictures wherever online I share anything. A problem with this is knowing that the pictures will very rarely look as good in other people?s browsers and apps as they do to me in Lightroom on a big bright 4K screen. Thus this piece, a basic investigation of how photos are processed and transformed on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. I was never that much of an Instagram poster; Insta does a good job of taking your crappy phone pix and juicing them up with filters so they look way better.
Vision 1993
I?ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it?s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in the back of my head kept saying ?I once read about what this is trying to be.? What I was remembering was Virtual Light, a 1993 novel by William Gibson, allegedly set in 2006.
DC Again
For the second time this winter I?ve been to Washington and back. Herewith pictures and feelings. Everyone?s seen plenty of photos of The Capital City Of The United States so I?ve tried for fresh views. My feelings are more mainstream than my pictures, I?m pretty sure; the stories DC tells aren?t subtle. Apologies I know folks in the region and I have standing offers from people whose taste I trust to introduce me to others whose company they?re sure I?d enjoy. I ignored those people and offers. Sorry about that, and I have an excuse.
Lofree Flow
Back in 2008, I complained here about Apple keyboards. Apple still hasn?t addressed my complaint (hard to believe, I know). So, 15 years later, as in late 2023, I picked up a Lofree ?Flow?, which I gather had a Kickstarter and advertises itself as ?The smoothest mechanical keyboard?. I?ve been using it long enough to offer opinions. The problem with Apple keyboards is illustrated by the picture below; The Lofree is in the middle. They?re all wireless. While the small Apple product at the bottom is really old, today?s equivalent has the same problems: There are no Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys, and the arrow keys are annoyingly small.
Mourning Google
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.
Five Electric-Jag Years
I got a note from Jaguar advising that my free five-year ?InControl Remote and Protect? subscription was expiring and would be $99/year (Canadian) going forward. That?s right, this month is five years since I picked up our 2019 Jaguar I-Pace and joined the EV tribe. Thus this (final?) visit to the Jaguar Diary series. $99, you say?! Yeah. What you get is a mobile app (and Web site) that does useful things, including: Turn on the climate control to warm or chill the car while you?re having breakfast.
Happy New Year!
Customarily, on this day we go for a walk by the sea. This year ?we? was just me, because Post-Covid. I have pictures; subdued pictures, it was that sort of day. Herewith a few of those, and year-end ramblings on optimism, AI/ML, cameras, and social media. Optimism? The climate catastrophe is gonna get worse before it starts getting better. But I see rays of light that might illuminate 2024. I really don?t think the Americans are going to elect That Guy again. I think unemployment will stay low and worker power will increase correspondingly.
Planes, Cameras, Capitals
Since Covid started I haven?t traveled, except for a short hops to visit Mom in Saskatchewan. But I spent Monday and Tuesday in Washington DC workin? for The Man (the man being Uncle Sam) and came away with notes on planes and hotels and cameras and people. First, camera news The rest of this piece is miscellaneous travel notes, aimed at people who are interested in Washington DC or the travel experience. But you might want to skim through it anyhow for the pictures. As usual, I traveled with a camera bag containing an excellent Fujifilm and a variety of lenses.
Recent Music Books
Seems that for the past few months most of the books I?ve read have been sci-fi (which I wrote up here) or about music. Herewith notes on four of the latter. The subjects are Philip Glass, John Cale, Cuba, and getting loaded. Glass Words Without Music is Philip Glass?s autobiography. I should start by saying that I?m a big fan, bought lots of albums back in the day. For anyone unfamiliar with the flavor, I recommend the following: Open up your favorite streaming service and say ?Play Mishima by Philip Glass?.
Recent Sci-Fi
Seems that for the past few months most of the books I?ve read have been sci-fi or about music. Herewith notes on the most recent sci-fi/fantasy. Featuring Emily Tesh, Martha Wells, John Scalzi, Sandra Newman, Vajra Chandrasekera, Arkady Martine, and P. Djèlí Clark. Used to be I?d put Amazon links in when I mentioned books, and route a few commission bucks into my Amazon account. No longer. While I?m not a fanatic, if I can do something using a Big Tech or an alternative, I?m going to be trying the alternative. Alternatives are good.
Late Light
Late in the year, I mean. We?re hurtling toward the solstice and the photon flow in the short hours between official sunup and sundown hardly deserves the name ?daylight?. But when the Pacific Northwest cloud and rain and fog let up, the always-slanting sunlight is very pure. Which I plan to salute but then disrespect via whimsical photomanipulation. Not apologizing either. What happened was, I ran a few neighborhood errands in the rare November clarity and then there was this tree. That?s about how it looked. [Narrator: Enter Lightroom.] But here?s the thing. That torrent of autumnal yellow is cool and I liked it, but I thought, well, maybe I could do something with that; good raw material!
Green and Brown Sauce
Here?s a simple dish that hits the spot as Winter?s chilly dimness comes at us from all directions. It?s a pasta sauce featuring crispy bacon and braised greens. Here are the ingredients: Bacon that I?ve cut up into little squares and sizzled for twenty or so minutes starting with a bit of olive oil, until they?re that nice golden-brown shade. Then some braising greens: Kale and chard in this case. Note: The proportions in the picture are are wrong, there should be more greens, they always cook down more than I expect. Now, the brown fluid? You?re going to want some liquid for the braising, and it needs to add flavor.
Global Sensor Bandwidth
The photo-world is all agog over Sony?s just-announced (but not shipping till next year) high-end ($6K) camera, the ?9 III, because it has a ?global sensor?. No, the ?global? label didn?t mean anything to me either, when I first read it. The write-ups about it have explainers and cool pictures (PetaPixel, DPReview). I found myself wondering ?What is this thing?s bandwidth?? and thus this note. I?ll toss in another little explainer so you don?t have to click on a link like a savage. Non-global shutters A digital camera sensor has millions of pixels arranged on a grid (in non-obvious and geometrically interesting ways, but let?s not go there); they are analog devices that measure how many photons hit them.
Recent Griffiths
Back in 2014, in Saint Hilda, I posted a rave review of Nicola Griffith?s novel Hild. I just finished its sequel Menewood and, in between, read her much-smaller Spear. These are all extremely good books and if you like well-done portrayals of violent conflict and royal-court politics and historical flavors and hot sex in just about any combination, you?re apt to like these. Hild, again Yes, I read it again when Menewood was about to drop and boy, did I ever enjoy doing so. I won?t revisit the details from that 2014 review linked above, just want to re-emphasize the flavor.
On C2PA
Leica, the German maker of elegant but absurdly-expensive cameras, just released the M11-P. The most interesting thing about it is a capability whose marketing name is ?Content Credentials?, based on a tech standard called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), a project of the Content Authenticity Initiative. The camera puts a digital watermark on its pictures, which might turn out to be extremely valuable in this era of disinformation and sketchy AI. Herewith a few words about the camera (Leicas are interesting) but mostly I want to describe what C2PA does and why I think it will work and how it will feel in practice.
Wild World
I?ve come to loathe autumn. It echoes the current stage of my own life a little too closely. Plus it?s plenty hard to just stay level, any season of this filthy year. I saw someone on social media asking (may not have the words quite right) ?How you folks holding it together while the world?s burning?? I looked for something useful and short to say, came up empty. But now maybe this. There?s the plague and the fascists and mass shooters and people killing babies for the greater glory of Palestine and Israel.
Feminized Feed
My online social life is almost all on the Fediverse (obligatory plug for our member-owned co-op Mastodon instance) and I find it generally satisfying. But back in early September, I noticed that my feed was extremely male-dominated. I set out to fix that and???a rare piece of good news???it worked! Herewith methods and numbers. Numbers I wish I?d been a little more careful before I started this, as in recording the gender ratio in my feed at a more sophisticated level than ?seems to be mostly men?. And also noting how many people I was following.
Rock Tech
Last night, my son and I took in Guns N? Roses? Vancouver show at ?B.C. Place?, the big football/soccer stadium, its roof closed for the event. It was a fine show, even though I wasn?t and still am not much of a GnR fan. The show deserves a few words, and also arena-rock concert technology is changing in interesting ways. Enlarge to see Slash. The band I impulse-bought the tickets when the show was announced. G&R have real cultural heft and I?d never seen them, seemed like a good enough reason.
Sucking It Up
My social-media stream veers left, full of progressive voices. I like it that way. Also, I?m a White Male TechBro Boomer. So that stream is full of vitriolic attacks from smart people that seem aimed at me personally. I get feelings, the kind I?d never share in the moment. But let me try to step back and offer perspective. ?Not all?? Most of you know the history, but just in case: Back in 2017 the #MeToo conversation exploded into life, Harvey Weinstein?s downfall the proximate cause. It was a horrible, wonderful outburst of shared pain and anger and while we haven?t done away with that particular flavor of abuse, I think #MeToo moved the societal needle in a good direction, at least in some places.
Social-media Search Comparo
Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon (as of last week) all have a built-in search capability. So now?s a good time for a first-look comparison. My social-media life is at @[email protected], a member-owned co-op Mastodon instance, but I regularly visit Bluesky and Threads, just to keep in touch. I continue to believe that the evolution of humanity?s tools of conversation is terribly important. This week, our member-owned co-op instance installed Mastodon 4.2 and turned on search. Methodology LOL This mini-study uses a single query: "dark matter", two words enclosed in quotes, which many search engines will interpret as a search for the phrase, as distinct from the two words.
Digger Unearthed
Digger is a Hugo-winning Webcomic by the excellent and remarkably prolific Ursula Vernon, originally written between 2005 and 2011. This essay exists to recommend the book, with a bit of back-story, but also to recommend a good way to read it. When Digger was coming out as a comic book it was popular, and then there was an omnibus of the whole thing, but eventually the print run ran out, and you couldn?t buy it any more. The problem was that it?s really freaking huge???a thousand-ish pages???and thus expensive to print, and publishers didn?t want to.
Safe Pixel Unlock
My recent upgrade from Pixel 4 to 7 moved me from one to two biometric sensors; the thing unlocks with either face or finger. But the default setup is unsafe; making it safe is a little inconvenient, but worth doing. I love fingerprint unlock, first experienced in 2016 on my then-state-of-the-art Nexus 5X. Its reader was on the back where your index finger naturally lands, had a physical target to guide your touch, and it never freaking failed! My Pixel 4 replaced the fingerprint sensor with outstandingly great face unlock, even worked in the dark.
Not Marching
My inbox is full of reminders that this Friday, September 15, 2023, is the Global Climate Strike; marches and demonstrations are happening everywhere (here in Vancouver, starting 1PM Pacific at City Hall). But I?m not going. I?m too angry, angry enough to be stupid. We?ve been marching and demonstrating and petitioning and getting arrested for decades and yet greenhouse gas emissions are not going down. Forests are burning, cities are sinking. This last summer, full of the hottest-days-on-record, will be one of the coolest that today?s children will ever experience.
Outer Átl??a7tsem
On most maps is its colonial name: Howe Sound. It?s a triangular body of water northwest of Vancouver, its longest side about 40km, scattered with islands. Here?s a map. The Sound and its islands are mostly named after 19th-century British naval officers, which in 2023 I find loathsome. It?s time to lose the dead limeys and revive the Indigenous names. The area was peopled by the Squamish; they used more than one name, but these days ?Átl??a7tsem? seems to be what people (and officials) are using. It may be hard to spell but it?s not hard to say.
Unicode Scalar Value
Suppose you?re writing code (or defining a protocol) that involves interchanging messages, and those messages include text for humans to read. You owe it to the world to make any such text Unicode, so that the humans can use Korean or Arabic or whatever else they live in. It turns out to be non-obvious how to say ?do Unicode right.? Today?s ongoing piece exists to tell you how. Here?s the rule The text must consist of a sequence of Unicode scalar values, i.e integers in the inclusive ranges 0-0xD7FF and 0xE000-0x10FFFF.
Mastodon Status Check
My social-media life has been Fediverse-first since last November. I stick my head into Bluesky and Threads regularly, but no longer bother visiting Twitter/X much. This piece takes a close look at Mastodon-land as things stand in late summer 2023. What?s working, what?s not, what are the alternatives? First, my biases: I?m pretty sure that federation is the only plausible path for social media. Also: Right now, being on our member-owned co-op Mastodon server is the best social-media experience I?ve had in years and years, maybe ever. Yeah, there are only maybe a couple of million active users, but a high proportion of the people I want to listen to, and that I want to be heard by, are here.
Scanography
Recently I visited Alex Waterhouse-Hayward; he gave me an excellent lunch and then I observed scanography at work, which was cool. Then I remembered that I?ve long wanted to write about his unique approach to technology. Let?s start with the good part, the picture: Hosta ?Halcyon?, 1 August 2023.By Alex Waterhouse-Hayward; Really deserves to be expanded. Alex is an interesting guy and an accomplished professional photographer; at age 80, he still gets regular gigs. Check his site and especially the blog, featuring his extremely colorful autobiography, illustrated and adorned with pictures.
Workin? for the Man
I think that anybody who publishes publicly should disclose who?s paying them, because it?s unethical not to. Call me old-fashioned. So I?m here to disclose a new paymaster and tell you almost nothing more. But stick around anyhow, because I have a moderately funny onboarding story. Just the facts For some months now, I have been working a few hours most weeks, part-time, for The Man. What man, you ask? The man, I mean: Uncle Sam! Specifically, I?ve been helping an agency of the United States government, in the capacity of Invited Expert, with an in-progress litigation between them and Meta Platforms, Inc.
Long Links
My Long Links blog fragments curate long-form pieces that I think worth an investment of time, acknowledging that most people with jobs and lives and so on can?t read all of them, in the hopes that one or two will reward, Dear Reader, an intrusion into your scarce free time. Here?s another offering. But first, why haven?t I written any since December 2022? [Hmm, there?s a problem here; too many of these links are to the New Yorker. I will pay attention to this issue in future outings.] One reason for the Long Links hiatus is that I?ve been Workin?
Mimestream
I?ve been doing my email using the Mimestream app for the last six weeks or so, and apparently I?m not going back to Gmail-in-the-browser; the choice wasn?t a slam-dunk but I seem to have made it. Mimestream is a Gmail client (specifically, not IMap generally) and a native MacOS app. Now (assuming you know what Gmail and MacOS apps are) you know exactly what to expect, and whether or not you might like it. I?m just here to fill in the corners. Unfortunately, I can?t possibly share any screenshots because a lot of my traffic is about two extremely non-public projects; but the web site has plenty.
Pixel 7 RAW vs JPG
Back in 2019, when I had a Pixel 2, I compared the Google Android camera app?s RAW (specifically DNG) files against its JPGs, and was left with little temptation to save the DNG files. I just repeated the experiment with my brand-new Pixel 7 and the results are more complicated. Multiple reviewers have pointed out that the P7 has a really damn good camera/app combo and, well yeah, no point me pounding that drum. It?s scary good. Background: ?Real?-camera RAW On my camera-that-isn?t-also-a-telephone (currently a Fujifilm X-T30) I always shoot in RAW, which is some weirdo Fuji proprietary bit-bag that Lightroom turns into DNG for me to edit.
Fediverse Governance
When there?s anything that you?re a member or citizen or user of, you should be concerned about who runs it and how it?s run. This is most obviously true of your nation, but also of your book club and your workplace. And, these days, the online place where you interact with your fellow humans: Social Media. This essay describes the Fediverse and its self-defence mechanisms, outlines a potential attack on it, which makes a nice case study on who runs things, and how. Status quo The governance of Social Media has historically been simple: The corporation that owns the service has the power.
CSS Boost
The blog you are now looking at is looking a little different (better I think), especially on mobile devices, because the CSS has been improved. I have a report on the details, and unexpected lessons. What launched me into action was the acquisition of a Pixel 7, on which this blog?s text was unreadably tiny. I?m not sure what changed, but I got complaints from a couple of other people at the same time that I noticed it myself, so maybe it?s Android?s fault? Anyhow, couldn?t ignore that problem. On top of which, I had a list of minor gripes that had been on the to-do list for way too long.
No Man?s Sky and Apple Silicon
I updated to a 14"/32G/M2-Pro MacBook Pro a few weeks ago but (unusually) haven?t written about it here. Recently, No Man?s Sky for Mac was announced. Since I played that regularly but casually for a couple of years starting in 2016 on PS4, I thought I?d give it a try, and now I?ve put in a few hours. Here?s a weird counterintuitive idea: Maybe games are what the MacBook Pro is built for? Nice planet! Tech Notes It?s on Steam, and if you already have NMS on Steam/Windows, it?s free. You can cross-play with people on some other platforms but I?m not really sure of that story yet.
AR Vision
?AR?, as in Augmented Reality. ?Vision?, as in not what Apple?s selling. It?s been a decade now that I?ve thought that AR will be a next Really Big Thing, once the technology to build it is here (which it isn?t). Since Meta and Apple and plenty of startups are muddying the waters around what AR might mean, here?s a vision of the AR mid-game. Not the end-game, since that?s unimaginable, but still a long way out from here. Side-trip: Why not AppleVision? The Vision Pro looks like a cool piece of gear. There are two apps where I can see coughing up the $3500 right now today.
Pixel 4 ? 7
I just replaced my poor tired battered old Pixel 4 with a garish ?Lemongrass? Pixel 7. I just don?t care that much about mobile technology any more???what was the last time a new phone changed your life????but jumping four years and three generations ought to be newsworthy, no? Self-portrait.Disclosure: Big fat farmer fingers. Why? First question: Why a new phone at all? My four-year-old Pixel was fast enough, small enough to be comfy in any pocket, camera still one of the mobile greats. But the battery was wearing out and the USB-C socket was pretty well done for.
Parasound Halo P 6 Preamp
I just bought one of these things and, while the high-end audio community is small, every time I post on the subject, I get stimulating commentary. In particular, anyone who?s interested in the state of the audio DAC art might want to read this. Also there?s a little bug in the P 6 manual that I?ll mention to help future Web-searchers. First things first: The P 6 is a pretty great product, and reasonably priced, and might fit into a lot of peoples? homes. Why? I listen to analog music on vinyl, and digitally via a Mac, which has 290G of music representing my former CD collection and also runs YouTube Music.
CL XLIV: Long Tree Lenses
We had our first real recreational visit to the cabin on the May long weekend. I pointed lenses at trees and came away with pictures that charmed me but are unsatisfactory. Which offers an excuse for a bit of camera geekery. No, even better, lens geekery. But first, the pictures. Whether you?re on the beach, or up the hill looking out over the ocean, sometimes you should ignore the ocean and look up instead. That big cedar is perched on rocks right at the water?s edge and frequently serves as a bald-eagle eagle perch and launchpad.
Antifascist Ethics
Dear America: Please forgive this Canadian offering reactions to what?s going on south of our border. Because I struggle every day to avoid sinking beneath the waters of rage, and I need to offload. Here goes: Please meet my Uncle Allen Scott, an anti-Fascist. My mother was the youngest of six children, Allen (he went by his middle name) the eldest; thus my uncle, although our lifespans are disjoint. He fought the Fascists in Italy, was wounded, healed, went back to Europe after D-Day, fought with the Canadian push into the Netherlands. Died on October 27, 1944 in Dordrecht, of wounds, in Nazi captivity.
Blog Previews
When you put a Web link in a Mastodon post, sometimes you get a nice little graphical preview, sometimes not. Before today, links to the blog you are now reading were, well, meh. Just a blank white box with the URL. So I put in the Open Graph Protocol prettification voodoo and the previews are nicer. Yay me. Now, I know that most of you use modern publishing systems that do this flawlessly, but some of us write our own, like I did. (In 2002. In Perl. But I digress.) Anyhow, here?s a rundown on how, because I know I?m not the only self-authoring savage and also I still see lots of links from Fediverse posts that suffer from blank-white-box syndrome.
Bluesky Facts and Opinions
The Fediverse has exploded in discussion of Bluesky, now that it?s launched a beta and harvested a few celebrities. Quite a lot of Fediverse voices have been angry and hostile, pointing out that several years of intense effort have produced a working ActivityPub-based federated monopoly-resistant conversational social network, and asking who are these dweebs ignoring that work and re-inventing the wheel, probably in an attempt to enrich Jack Dorsey?! I have a lot of sympathy with those opinions. Having said that, the assertions are not all fact-based. So, here are facts (and a few opinions) about Bluesky, as of late April 2023.
Amazon Q1 2023 Financials
In recent years I?ve posted a quick analysis of Amazon?s results each quarter in a Twitter thread. I don?t use Twitter much any more, and Mastodon doesn?t make it easy to post threads, so the blog it is; this is the second outing. Summary: Amazon?s retail business loses money (as usual) but the AWS and Advertising businesses are huge, throw off loads of cash, and continue to grow fast. They subsidize the money-losing retail operation in a way that seems deeply unfair to me. Source: Q1 2023 Earnings Release. Looking at Amazon as a whole, quarterly sales are up 9% year-over-year to $127.4B.
Easy Cameras
I just enjoyed reading Have you considered using a camera? by Joe Rosensteel over at Six Colors. It says many smart things about photography with a phone as opposed to a real ?camera?. Also, it?s funny; I recommend it. But then down toward the end it made an assertion that was so shocking that I had to stop and read it twice, then again: That shooting with a phone is easier and faster than with a camera. Because I believe the opposite is true. I quote: ?The big thing that you?ve probably noticed from shooting stuff back and forth between the camera and the iPhone is just how much more effort and thought needs to go into your camera shots.
2023 TV Update
We just bought a ChromeCast 4K with Google TV and it does what it says on the package, adequately well. I?m posting this TV-setup piece because (to my surprise) every time I write about TV, I get a lot of reaction; apparently others care. Also because I figured out a couple of non-obvious things about the ChromeCast that should be online so others can find them. System snapshot We have an LG 4K TV connected to a receiver that drives two small stereo speakers and a subwoofer.
Girl Groups
This is a reaction to parts of three evenings watching Coachella 2023 and motivated by the fact that more or less all of the music that grabbed me featured females. This notably included Blackpink, the biggest Girl Group in the world. But they weren?t the best women artists there, not even close. Spoiler: boygenius was. Part of the problem was that every time I switched to a Coachella channel with male names on it, the males were either bobbing their heads over a DJ deck, or banging out the hip-hop. I.e. few musical instruments or vocal melodies were involved.
Working Well
Humanity?s institutions on this planet are generally not working that well just now, which is depressing. By way of cheerfulness, and maybe education, here are two counterexamples; professional interactions from my own day-to-day life where things go about as well as one could want. And maybe there?s a lesson in that. Velo Star What happened was, I had a little fall on my e-bike (by the way, if you haven?t tried one, follow that link and maybe I can help convince you, because you should). No damage to me, but the gearshift was wonky, it?d shift up but down was a struggle, and the whole thing just didn?t feel right.
Tweeting Effectively
Since I bailed out of Twitter last November, I?ve continued to use it in (nearly) write-only mode, usually to promote things published elsewhere, most often Fediverse/Mastodon stuff. Recently I learned a way to do this more effectively, where by ?more effectively? I mean ?more people see it.? Tl;dr: Don?t put any hyperlinks in your post???if you need them, post a thread with the links in the trailing tweets. Impressions Twitter says I have 45.7K followers. Since I?ve been there since early 2007, that number is a vast overestimate; many of those followers have drifted away or died (really, I could mention a few) and just aren?t looking any more.
Fediverse Cheesemaking
Starting sometime April 7th you can call me a CoSocialist, because my new social-media handle is becoming @[email protected]. CoSocial is yet another fediverse outpost running Mastodon and with a blog. What?s different is that it?s Canadian, and a member-owned co-operative. Both of those matter to me, but the co-op part is the real story. It?s not complicated: $50/year and you?re a member/owner, with an account at cosocial.ca. There?ll never be ads. Nobody will ever get rich. A few people might make a living, down the road. You will never be the product. As for the cheese, read on.
Rolling-mill Oops
The world being what it is, feels like a little humor is in order. Here?s a story from my misspent youth, when I was a co-op student at a steel mill and had a Very Bad Day. This story was originally published as a Tweet thread in response to the following: That thread will probably go down with the Twitter ship and I?d like to save it, so here goes. During the summer of 1980, my last before graduation, I had a co-op job at Dofasco, a steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario.
Sober Carpenter
I was drinking an glass of excellent Sober Carpenter ?West Coast IPA? at lunch when I ran across Even moderate drinking is bad for us. Enter nonalcoholic beer in the Washington Post. Drinking less seems to be A Thing just now and I suppose alt-beverages too, so here?s my experience. Right at the beginning of the year I saw this and decided to drink less. I didn?t try anything fancy, just restricted alcohol to two days a week. I?ve never been a heavy drinker but for some decades had had wine or beer with most dinners and a whiskey at bedtime.
First Warm Day
This was the first day of 2023 when it was pleasant to be out in just a couple of light layers, and we have flowers, and I have a camera and a blog, so obviously flowersharing is gonna happen. The big story is the first daffodil. This is not a real full-sized daffodil, but a sort of microdaff. The big ones will be along later. The observant reader will have noticed that crocuses are still blooming. No kidding! What actually excites me more is that the mighty magnolia is getting ready to go. It is a mass of buds, and pretty soon quite a few of them will be bulging out of their little bodices and showing a hint of pink.
The LLM Problem
So far I?ve had nothing to say about the LLM chatbot frenzy. My understanding of the technology is shallow and I?ve no sense for its functional envelope, and lots of other people have had smart things to say. I hadn?t even conversed with any of the bots. But I fell off the wagon a few days ago and put time into GPT3 and (especially) the new GPT4-based Bing chat. I got off Bing?s waitlist a few days before the recent general availability, so I have more hands-on than most people. Plus I caught up on background reading.
Stream Automator
I have a problem, and I think I?m not alone: Getting TV is too complicated and too expensive. I know what a solution might look like, and if someone can build it and charge just a little bit for access, they might become very wealthy. Alternatively, if someone could build an open-protocol-based co-operative tool to fix the problem, they?d be a benefactor of humanity. Let?s call the thing I want a ?Stream Automator?, Automator for short. I thought of ?Streamplex? but there are already a few things named that; none of them look likely to be significant in the long-term but oh well.
Two ongoing Decades
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first-ever public post on this blog (Spoiler: Not that interesting). Some posts mark milestones: Is This Thing On? (one day), One ongoing Year, 730 ongoing Days, Thirty-six ongoing Months, and for the ten-year mark, Birthday! I just re-read that last ten-years note and I think it?s good. If you care about this subject at all, do me a favor and go read it. I?ll wait. Then, a few more words about doing this in 2023 and into the future. Stats & tech As I write this, there are 5,263 entries here containing 5,098 pictures and 2,249,991 words.
More Monos!
Our story thus far is here. Tl;dr: I looked at a bunch of monospace fonts and recommended a few. The piece went kind of nuts, way past 50K views as I write this, and a flood of comments here and on YCombinator, nearly all of which took the form of ?You left out my favorite font, which is X!? So I harvested 14 values of X, and let?s have a look at them! I?ve enjoyed this little project enough to pay actual real money for three of these. The methodology is the same as last outing.
2023 Crocuses
As is traditional, a few photos of the year?s first purple-and-yellow garden citizens; portents of approaching spring that are much appreciated while the days are still short and wet and grey. The first half of February is on the early side, but not as early as last year when we saw them in January. I had a quarrel with our cat, who observed me lying down outside to get an angle on these guys and wanted, of course, to frolic in the foliage right where I was looking. One picture is with my aging Pixel 4, the others with a ?real?
Modern Mono
I?ve just finished setting up a new Mac (14" MBP, M2 Pro, 32G, 4T). It dawned on me that most of my really intense interactions with this thing involve looking at ?monospace? (i.e. fixed-width) text; in Emacs where I write this blog, in my IDE, and in my terminal. The ones that came with the machine by default are, well, OK, but maybe we can do better. So I got on Mastodon and asked: ?Dear LazyWeb: Setting up a new Mac, what are some groovy new monospace fonts for terminals and IDEs??
Larkin Poe Live, 2023
Last night I enjoyed a concert by Larkin Poe (Wikipedia) at Vancouver?s excellent Commodore Ballroom. The music was just fine???more on that below???but mostly I?m here to think out loud about how Rock & Roll embeds into the wider world in 2023. If you visited the links above, you already know that Larkin Poe is anchored by sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell; Rebecca sings lead and plays normal electric guitar; Megan also sings and plays what they call a lap steel guitar, but it looks weird to me (there are pictures below) and the Internet doesn?t seem to know what precisely it is.
Amazon Q4 2022 Financials
For the last couple of years, each quarter I?ve been posting a quick analysis of Amazon?s quarterly business results in a Twitter thread. I don?t use Twitter much any more, and Mastodon doesn?t make it easy to post threads, so the blog it is. Summary: Amazon?s retail business loses money (as usual) but the AWS and Advertising businesses are huge, throw off lots of cash, and continue to grow fast. They subsidize the money-losing retail operation in a way that seems deeply unfair to me. Source: Q4 2022 Earnings Release. Looking at Amazon as a whole, quarterly sales are up 9% year-over-year to $149.2B, annual sales also 9% to $514B.
Abbie Angie Velar
I?m driving a loaner car from the Jaguar Land-Rover dealership, a 2023 Range Rover Velar. I?m not in love with it. But it?s got a name: Abbie Angie. What happened was, my lovely 2019 Jaguar I-Pace was in for an annual checkup (first time I?ve paid a penny for maintenance). On Friday when I picked it up, the dealership guy told me ?Gonna be seeing you soon again, there?s this big recall, the problem affects less than 5% of I-Paces but we still have to do 19 hours of labor to tear it apart and put it back together.?
Quamina v1.0.0
Today I hit the ?release? button on v1.0.0 of Quamina (introduction here), a fast open-source pattern-matching library in Go. Gotta keep doing some coding to keep me honest! The purpose of today?s piece is to provide a snapshot status report and record a few technology gripes just to get them off my chest; sharing is caring. I built Quamina v0.1.0; since then, it?s had help from others. Thanks especially to Jamie, Micha, and Yosi. I peeked back in history and the first project check-in was January 24, 2022, so that?s a year and a day from idea to stability.
Class Reductionist
Like many geeks, I hoard a few dozen domain names, and currently they include the .com/.org/.net triple for ?classreductionist?. ?Class Reductionist? is considered an insult by many progressives and as far as I know, there?s no organized faction claiming the label. And while I wouldn?t either, I?m pretty sure I?d support the key policy goals that a hypothetical Class Reductionist would. Definitions and argumentations Let?s start with the Urban Dictionary?s: ?The idea in some leftist circles that all oppression based on gender, sex, race, etc. is just a byproduct of class struggle, and that once class disparity is solved, all those issues will vanish.?
Winter Market
Saturday dawned chilly and rainy, but I went to the Riley Park Market anyhow. What with family and health and weather issues, I?ve been mostly cooped up lately, have been feeling caged, bored, and blue. Also, the Market is only ten blocks from our place, along a bike route. So I saddled up the e-bike and went hunting. For Vancouver people: The summer version of that Riley Park Market is average at best; I rarely bother to go any more. So I wasn?t expecting much, but what a pleasant surprise; this year the Winter Market is more than twice as big and was full of vendors I hadn?t seen before.
Private and Public Mastodon
Here?s how to get into a lot of trouble: Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet. And (like me) are an reasonably competent programmer. And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter. And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ?em and let everyone search ?em and find wonderful things!
Privacy Is OK
I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman?s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven?t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes. Blackman?s description of what Signal does is accurate: Provides an extremely private communication path among individuals and groups; private to the extent that Signal.org (a nonprofit) doesn?t even know who?s talking to whom, let alone what they?re saying. Blackman argues that this is dangerous because bad people could use it to plan nefarious activities and the legal authorities wouldn?t be able to eavesdrop on them and stop them.
Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical?
The big story occupying space in my mind (and on this blog) is the #TwitterMigration. As Twitter grows troubled and troubling, ?Fediverse? technologies in general and Mastodon in particular are successfully attracting many users and providing a pleasant experience. Everyone is wondering out loud whether Mastodon can take the strain and whether it can provide cool new features. What we haven?t been discussing are two ethical questions: First, is it OK to bail out of Twitter? And if bailing out, is Mastodon a acceptable place to land? Bye, Twitter (OK?)
Twitter Futures
I write this on December 16, 2022, as the landscape shifts convulsively, as Twitter becomes the main character on Twitter. It?s reasonable to wonder what comes next. Anybody who says they can predict what?s going to happen is wrong. But we can peer down one or two of the infinitely-forking paths into the future and maybe see something useful. However many the paths, there are only two interesting outcomes: First, and most likely, Twitter no longer matters. Second, and not impossible, it finds a route back to relevance. Is my investigation pursued in an even-handed spirit?
Long Links
I hope everyone?s winter (or summer, depending) is going well. I find myself much busier recently, but still the browser tabs add up. Herewith another curation of long-form pieces that few will have time for all of, but a subset of them may be enriching for a subset of you. Marc Brooker is one of the most senior engineers over at AWS; I was proud to think him a peer. Here he writes important things on an important subject: the power of writing. Writing Is Magic is pretty magic, ten paragraphs of sharp observation and wisdom you?ll be better for having read.
Protect Me From What I Want
Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize ?engagement?, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don?t care what they?re showing you and if it turns out that showing you exclusively stories vilifying or praising Donald Trump (depending) maximizes engagement, then that?s what you?ll see. So the chant over there is ?No algorithms on Mastodon!? This chant is wrong, and the discussion around it teaches us that we need clarity on what algorithms are, what moral weight they can carry, and whether they can be avoided.
Bye, Twitter
Today I?m leaving Twitter, because I don?t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it?s probably going to break down. Read on for details. I was beginning to think the End-Of-Twitter narrative was overblown, but evidence is stacking up. First, the increasingly-toxic politics; check out Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom by Josh Marshall, and Elon Musk Bans CrimethInc. from Twitter at the Urging of Far-Right Troll. Then there?s the technology. Because of the way modern Web Services work, it?s unsurprising that it ticks along even with much of the workforce gone.
AWS and Blockchain
This week saw the cancellation of the Australian Stock Exchange?s long-running effort to build a blockchain-based trading system. Which, oddly, has me thinking of 2016, when AWS decided not to make a strategic investment in blockchain, with my input a contributing factor. It felt like a good story while it was happening. Since I left AWS in 2020, I?ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can?t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics.
Mastodon Moment
My first Mastodon post (that I can find) dates from April 6, 2017. I try to check out interesting new life-online technologies, and this was one. But I found it sort of quiet and empty and didn?t say much. Now, following on Muskification, Twitter may become an unattractive online home, so it?s time to explore alternatives. I?ve been digging deeper into Mastodon (so have really a lot of other people) and this is a progress report. Just the facts I re-activated on Oct 28th. I?ve posted (?tooted?, some say) 42 times.
Just Don?t
Sometimes it?s wrong to begin a phrase with the word ?just?. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there?s a common thread to be drawn. Stuck People with mental-health issues can get stuck. For example, when some combination of depression and anxiety means they can?t get out of bed all day, and can?t say why. Or when they really need to get dressed or packed or organized for some imminent un-reschedulable event, and can?t get started. It would be easy to ???sorry, it is easy, I know this because I have???say something like ?Just stand up and look out the window, it?s sunny.?
How Much For Twitter?
Following on Mr Musk?s acquisition of Twitter a discussion has broken out about what to charge for. Which makes sense, because Twitter revenue is kind of lousy, notably out of sync with its societal importance, and now they?ve got a great big honking debt to service. Whatever I may think about Twitter?s leadership, previous or current, I like the service and would prefer that it continue functioning. In fact, I like it enough to pay for it! But how much and what for? Blue check? No! The first idea being floated is charging for the ?blue check?
Still Forest Lives
I?ve said it before: Forests are therapy. So, here are pictures that might please eyes and ease minds. I?ve taken the camera out into these Keats-Island forests many times and who knows, maybe shared shots of the same living plants. Not going to apologize. Come along, let me take your eyes for a walk. Did I mention therapy? I don?t think it?s controversial to say that we?re years into a dark time for the planet and the soul, and if you?re not feeling the darkness you?re in a better spot than most, definitely than me.
Online Shopping, But?
But not from middlemen I mean, especially Amazon. Like most people, I regularly buy stuff online. (I think that saying ?most people? is now globally true?) But I have a big attitude problem about online retail aggregators in general and Amazon in particular. So as a matter of principle I?ve been trying to take significant purchases upstream to the source. One of the reasons Amazon succeeded is that they were good at making online retail easy at a time when most product manufacturers weren?t. I?m here to report that that?s changing in a good way; upstream purchasing is often a good experience.
Long Links
Hey everyone, welcome to autumn on the top half o? the orb and spring on the bottom. For your pleasure and edification, another curation of long-form pieces that pleased and edified this semi-retired person, one or two of which might boost your morale in these trying times. Featured: Tolkien as lexicographer, Wikipedia vs Fox News, John le Carré, and cheesy music from my youth. Let?s start with useful news on the vexed climate-catastrophe front: Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition. Out-take: ??we find that compared to continuing with a fossil fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition is likely to result in trillions of net savings.?
2022 Vancouver Election
In the City of Vancouver?s 2022 election, deciding who to vote for is extraordinarily difficult. Since we don?t have a ward system, we have to vote for one mayor, ten city councillors, seven park-board commissioners, and nine school-board trustees. There are six local political parties running random variations of mayoral candidates (or not) and full or partial slates for the other bodies. I just finished doing sufficient research to make my own choices; maybe my sharing it will be useful to one or two other Vancouverites. Wards please This process was ridiculous.
Autumn Golang Diary
I?ve posted here about my experiences with Go since 2013 and I guess it?s too late to stop now. This one is truly miscellaneous, just a bunch of things that built up in ?should write about this? notes to myself while working on Quamina. Switch switch switch Back in 2013 I wrote about now nice the Go switch statement is.
Luxury media
I was cruising through the supermarket when a shopping-cart traffic jam stalled me in front of the ?newsstand?. That word is in quotes because most things on offer aren?t news and in fact aren?t magazines in the traditional sense, but single-issue glossies about Princess Diana or Bruce Springsteen or Michelle Obama or Christmas. Anyhow, an awesome cover photo of an owl on the The Atlantic caught my eye; that cover also touted an article about Jack White, whose music I enjoy, so I impulse-bought it. Now I?m thinking about the quality-publishing business model.
Hello, Ruler
Hey, look what?s been open-sourced: AWS Event Ruler! Check out the announcement blog. I built v1.0 of this Java library while I was at AWS, and wrote about it in Filtering Lessons. Tl;dr: It offers APIs for declaring pattern-matching Rules, as many as you like, then for presenting data records called Events and finding out which Rules each Event matches, very quickly. It?s in production in multiple Amazon (not just AWS) services, notably EventBridge. Also see: Content-based Filtering. I wrote the Quamina library because I liked the Ruler concept so much that I wanted a do-over in another language.
Long Links
Hi everyone, once again I invite you to a curation of links to long-form pieces that I have time for but you may not. The hope is that one or two of these will enrich your life. This month, featuring quite a bit of music, computer keyboard obsession, politics as usual, and potatoes. But let?s start with music? recently, I?ve been writing less. Reasons include: Interesting things I?m working on that are non-public. And a software bug I haven?t figured out that?s blocking a software project. Also, I?ve been playing quite a bit of Diablo Immortal.
On Faith
What is ?faith?, anyhow? The answers can become abstract, but concretely it?s what gets Salman Rushdie stabbed in the face. Oh wait, is that statement anti-Islamic? Guilty as charged; but then I?m also anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist, and, well, there are too many organized religions to list them all. Herewith too many words on Faith and Truth, albeit with pretty pictures. I do find positive things to say, but at the end of the day, well, no. I?m not a moderate on this issue. I don?t believe, in general, that any supernatural event has ever occurred or, in particular, that any prayer has ever been answered.
Slow Travel
Suppose you believe, as I do, that we have to slash our carbon emissions drastically and urgently to ameliorate the worst effects of the climate catastrophe that is beginning to engulf us. And that you believe, as I do, that travel is a good thing for individuals and societies, and that in principle every human should enjoy the opportunity to visit every neighborhood around our fair planet. Can these beliefs be reconciled? I used to joke, when people looked askance at my refusal to leave Vancouver, that it was the center of the world: ?Ten hours to Heathrow, ten hours to Narita!?
False Creek Friend
I want to share a project I?ve been helping out with for the last couple of years; the False Creek Friends Society. I haven?t wanted to write about it before now because it was just big-ideas talk. But there?s some science starting up and if you?re nearby you might want to get involved. Courtesy of OpenStreetMap. What?s a ?False Creek?? Wikipedia has the facts. It?s a little piece of the Pacific stabbing into the belly of Vancouver, surrounded by condos, marinas, a cement maker, museums, festivals, Granville Island, and a really nice seawall.
Dark Matter Fun
Anyone who?s read one or two of my Long Links curations knows that I?m fascinated by the ongoing conundra in Astrophysics and Cosmology on the subject of Dark Matter. There are a couple of recent developments that are worth noting. Micro-introduction Astrophysicists were kind of forced into concluding that Dark Matter exists for several reasons, but the most obvious is that galaxies spin and the stars on the outer edges are orbiting too fast. Too fast, that is, given two assumptions: The only force that matters at galactic scale is gravity.
Living With Models
More people, more often, are finding themselves dealing with the output of Machine-Learning (ML) software. With even a little practice you can spot when it?s happening. It makes me wonder what the future of human/ML interaction looks like. Herewith a few personal experiences. Gmail spam One of the world?s largest software systems with an ML component? Spam used to be such a major irritant but now mostly it isn?t except when it is. Obviously, Gmail judges itself by how well it avoids errors both positive (branding legit email as spam) and negative (letting it through to get in my face).
Long Links
Dear Readers, once again a selection of links to long-form pieces which I, as a semi-retired person, have time for, but people with normal lives probably don?t. The hope is that one or two will enrich your life. Housekeeping note: I have said ?Yes? too often recently and Long-Linking opportunities will probably shrink. Featured this time out: American roots music, BC beer, how wealth vanishes, and the Apple M2. Let?s start with the music. My streamer has noticed that I really like Sierra Ferrell and has been feeding me increasing doses of acoustic American flavors.
Small Tables
Computer programs organize bits and bytes into ?data structures?. In software of any import, the data structures are usually more interesting than the code around them. This part of the Quamina Diary takes a close look at a very simple data structure that I have greatly enjoyed using to build finite automata, and which I think has lessons to teach; it?s called smallTable. The problem As described in a (pretty short) previous episode of this Diary, Quamina matches Patterns to Events, which are flattened into field-name/value pairs for the purpose.
Demerara Rebellion
I accidentally ended up learning a lot about the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. It?s a fascinating set of stories, worth sharing, worth learning about. Accidentally? I?d always liked the name ?Demerara? partly because my Dad loved molasses (on pancakes, toast, whatever) and so my childhood memories are rich with images of a big sticky black pot of Demerara Molasses on the breakfast table. I?ve recently released a software project I?ve been working on for a few months and thought I?d use that name. But I did a web search for ?demerara? and thus discovered the 1823 Rebellion (shame on me for not having known about it).
Making Code Faster
I?ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that ?writing software? basket, and here?s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster. How to think about it When you?re sitting down to create software, you probably start with preconceptions about whether and where there are likely to be performance issues. If you?re writing Ruby code to turn your blog drafts into HTML, it doesn?t much matter if republishing takes a few extra seconds.
Dangerous Gift
A friend of mine pinged me online, said ?Hey, remember that thing we were talking about doing a couple years ago? I still have one of the domain names, gonna let it go unless you want it.? I said ?sure, I?ll take it?. Him: ?Let me look up how to transfer it.? Me: ?I?ll look up how to receive it. There?s always some bureaucracy and ceremony. But all my domains are at R these days and they?re pretty good at making easy stuff easy.? (?R? refers to a well-known top-25 registrar, whose name I?m withholding to protect the guilty.)
Field-Value Automata
When I introduced Quamina, I described the core trick: You prepare an arbitrary JSON blob for automaton-based matching by ?Flattening? it into a list of name/value pairs, then sorting them in name order. Today, a closer look at how you work with the flattened data. This is one of a series of essays on programming topics motivated by my work on eventing services at AWS and, since then, on Quamina, a content-filtering library implemented in Go (GitHub). By example Consider the following Pattern: {"x": ["a"], "y": [1, 2]} It should match any JSON blob containing a top-level x field whose value is the string "a" and a top-level y field whose value is 1 or 2.
Golang Diaries: Generics
My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina, an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go?s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I kept trying things that looked like they ought to work but didn?t. I?m sharing this tour through that experience because I?m a reasonably competent programmer with mainstream tastes and if I hit these bumps in the road others probably will too.
Meet Quamina
No parent will name a favorite among their children. But I do have one among my brainchildren, my software contributions over the decades: The event-streaming code I helped build at AWS. After rage-quitting I missed it so much that over the last few months, I wrote a library (in Go) called Quamina (GitHub) that does some of the same things. This is about that. Quamina offers an API to a construct called a ?Matcher?. You add one or a hundred or a million ?Patterns? to a Matcher then feed ?Events? (data objects with possibly-nested fields and values) to it, and it will return you an array (possibly empty) of the Patterns each Event matches.
Long Links
Once again, a selection of long-form pieces for those who (unlike me) have jobs and won?t have time for all of, but might benefit from ingesting one or two. This month we have lots of musical offerings, along with politics, advice on how to walk, and 5G. Let?s start weird. I first ran across the writing of John Michael Greer when his site was called The Archdruid Report because Greer was in fact an Archdruid, which is to say the leader of a niche sect with ?Druid? in its name. He?s irritating as hell because his writing is bathed in an atmosphere of ?I?m so smart, I can see all sorts of things nobody else can and I?m doing you the favor of sharing my wisdom.?
4,000,000m Lessons
The odometer on my e-bike clicked over to 4K and, rather than a general-purpose ?e-bikes are great? rave, I thought I?d assemble a few concrete arguments for them, suitable for re-use with friends and loved ones in the (likely) case that you?re already convinced. With pictures. ? is prime. It?s good for you The skeptics are prone to say that if you want fitness, you should ride a real bike, dammit. They are wrong. Let me end this argument right here and now with Health benefits of electrically-assisted cycling: a systematic review and Riding Electric Bicycles Boon To Health And Not Cheating, Confirms Literature Review and The effect of cycling on cognitive function and well-being in older adults and Metabolic and Cardiovascular ...
Three Perfect Tools
We live in a world of things that have Product Managers and Design Teams and Documentation Architecture and often vast ambition. And yet, so many of them are so bad. And worse, some which are good then become bad for no good reason. There is a particular joy in a product that just does what you need done, in about the way you expect or (thrillingly) better, and isn?t hard to figure out, and doesn?t change unnecessarily. Here are three to learn from. Splitter At our cabin, we have reasonably modern electric heat that keeps things comfy, but for our occasional winter visits we also have a nice efficient wood-stove.
Long Links
Welcome to another Long Links, selected pointers to long-form pieces that have added value to my semi-retired days and one or two of which might reward you if you make time for them. A few of this month?s pieces aren?t free; it?s a bitter fact that the truth is paywalled but the lies are free. Sorry. Let?s start with climate issues, which I?m cheerful enough to think might be at the center of the world?s attention were it not for Covid and Mr Putin. One of my favorite environmentalists is Tzeporah Berman, who?s been fighting the good fights, and winning a few, for decades.
5G Skeptic
When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there?d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn?t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G offered, or I didn?t believe the opportunity was anywhere near big enough to justify the trillion-dollar build-out investment. Six years later, I still don?t. This is a report on a little online survey I ran, looking for actual real-world 5G impact to see if I was wrong.
Professor Dale and Me
To misquote William Gibson: ?The past is still here with us, just unevenly distributed.? I have a story to tell that stars Sergei Rachmaninoff and me. It starts just before 1900 in Moscow. My part ends around 1972 in the mountains of Lebanon, looking down over Beirut and the blue Mediterranean. It doesn?t have to do with computers and nothing in it matters to anyone living except me, but maybe you?ll enjoy a faintly exotic musical echo from a long time ago a long way away. In 1900, Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), pictured in 1897, was in rough shape.
Get Computer Glasses
Let me guess: You spend a lot of time in front of a computer, to which is attached a large high-resolution outboard screen, and you?re over 40, and you have glasses on your face. A lot of you will already know this, but if you don?t, run not walk to the nearest optometrist, get your eyes checked, and order a set of ?computer glasses?. Trust me on this. If you?re wearing ?reading glasses? You should go get an eye checkup anyhow, so you can get computer glasses, but also because an eye checkup can find out all sorts of problems that might become serious if untreated, like glaucoma and macular degeneration.
Long Links
Welcome to another curation of long-form pieces, the kind of thing that I, as a semi-retired person, have time for. While you probably don?t have the space for all of these, one or two might reward an investment of your attention. These are obviously grim times and indeed there?s grim stuff here but I?ve tried to add some smiles for balance. The world?s terrible but there?s great new music being created all the time! Let?s start with a palate-clearing blast of excellent hard rock from the ?EQD Japan All-Stars?; it?s actually a promo piece for Earthquake Devices (thus ?EQD?)
Getting Back
I watched all eight hours of Jackson?s Get Back Beatles documentary. I?m a pretty intense music geek and while I gather there were some for whom this was Too Much Beatles, there was hardly a moment I wanted to look away. I found the whole thing intense and feel like sharing a few purely musical take-aways: If you care about will-George-quit or the-meaning-of-Yoko drama, I got nothing for you. All these pictures are screen caps from the Get Back documentary by Peter Jackson on Disney+. Payment But first: I don?t subscribe to Disney+, a friend helped me out.
2022 Crocuses
It is an annual tradition on this blog to celebrate the early-spring arrival, in our front yard, of the first crocuses. Winters suck everywhere in Canada and while Vancouver?s don?t freeze your ass they do subtract light from life for way too many months. Thus, giving the little purple fellas a hearty greeting is therapeutic. With notes on photography and dead leaves. Our front yard is half-ish garden patches, the rest mossy/grassy green. Normally we shovel autumn?s leaves off the whole thing but last fall I only cleared the green space. I was a little worried that the leaves might get the in crocuses?
Lock-in and Multi-Cloud
Alone in a room with the customer?s CTO, I said ?So, I spent this morning talking to your people, and it looks like you?re using low-level generic tech for everything and managing it yourself. You could save a shit-ton of money by using high-level managed services and get load-scaling for free.? ?Yeah,? he said, ?but then we?d be locked in and the next time our enterprise contract comes up for renewal, you can screw us.? It doesn?t matter who the customer was, except that they were big, and they thought they were paying too much, and I thought so too.
Three Electric-Jaguar Years
This month marks three years of driving an electric car, a 2019 Jaguar I-Pace. I?ve written a lot about this, the research that went into it, what it feels like to own and operate, and the experience of driving it 1725km across Canada and back. All this on the theory that EV?s are an important tool in our best climate-emergency strategy. Like basically 100% of people who?ve gone electric, there?s no going back. In 2022, the requirements niche where a fossil-powered car makes sense is narrow and shrinking fast.
Pulp Fiction
A dozen years ago, our growing family created a problem: Too many books! So after I finished ripping our thousand CDs, we repurposed the CD rack into a bookcase, stuffed it with our genre paperbacks, and put it in the guest room. A few years later, the guest room became our son?s room and the pulp fiction went into boxes. But just now after another bout of domestic reorganization, they?re back out among us. I find their dingy colorful presence cheering. Check out the picture! For those who want to pixel-peep authors and titles, here?s a full-sized version.
New Year?s Day
In Vancouver, we have a tradition of going for a walk on New Year?s Day, no matter how foul the weather, if only to prove to Other Canadians that the thing is possible. 2022 too, despite its being an extremely low-expectations year. And it wasn?t the worst New Year?s Day beachwalk ever, so maybe it won?t be the worst year ever. And it leaves me with advice for the world. But first? The traditional Polar Bear Swim, in which hordes of howling Vancouverites, half hungover and the rest inebriated, charge pell-mell into the hostile waters of English Bay, was Covid-scotched like so much else good in life.
Long Links
For a while there I was posting a Long Links early in each month, recommending long-form pieces that I?d had the time to read, acknowledging that people who aren?t semi-retired wouldn?t have time for all of them but perhaps one or two would add value even for the busy. I fell out of that habit but now it?s 2022 and there are plenty of tabs I meant to write about, some dating back to early 2021. So? Welcome, everyone, to 2022, and let?s go long! I bet a lot of people who read this blog play video games.
Locally Optimal
It?s six months since my second Covid shot (team AZ/Moderna) and thus booster time. Which I found out this morning via SMS from my local (BC, Canada) Centre for Disease Control. The registration process was fast and painless. This is exactly the sort of thing we thought we were building the Internet for, and has lessons to teach. On my phone, I tapped the link in the SMS, which took me (more or less instantly) to a bone-simple browser form with two fields, my reference number (pre-filled-in) and my Personal Health Number (had to open my wallet to look at the card).
2021 Series Survey
What with Covid and being semi-retired, I had plenty of reading time in 2021. In particular, I got to the final volumes of multiple long-running literary franchises. (Some of those final volumes had been published years before.) I think that every series listed here is a good investment of your time. Two warnings: It?s mostly pretty mainstream, and kind of sci-fi heavy. Quick table of contents: Broken Earth, The Expanse, Merchant Princes/Empire Games, Neapolitan Novels, The Sandman, Sandman Slim, Trickster Trilogy.
Filtering Lessons
Last week, AWS announced (docs, blog) event filtering for Lambdas reading from SQS, DynamoDB, and Kinesis. Lambda?s new filtering is consistent with EventBridge?s. Also announced was faster, slicker, cheaper S3/EventBridge integration. These features rely on software I helped write. The problem turns out to be more interesting than you might expect, by a factor of 10¹² or so. I think it?d be really great if the code were open-sourced. The core idea is that in modern applications, streams of data flow around between services, and very often you want to select just some of the data out of the stream.
Listening to re:Invent
This is the week that AWS owns the tech news cycle because anyone who cares about it is watching the stories coming out of the re:Invent conference. I watched Adam Selipsky?s keynote this morning and it looks like AWS is moving in a very traditional direction for tech companies: Away from tech-first, towards business-first. Which is inevitable but also dangerous. Messages The ?S? in AWS stands for ?Services?. So presumably, the biggest imaginable announcement would be of new Web Services. There was only one in among the avalanche of biz-talk: managed 5G, nice but not terribly exciting.
CL XLII: Picture Hugs
Out on a walk with Lauren, we stopped in a park and I noticed she was holding an evergreen branch with one hand, stroking it with the other. ?Sometimes, you just got to hug a tree? she said. No lie. Especially when times are shitty. I can?t put you next to a tree but at least I can take you out in the woods photographically. It?s dark now and we can use all the help we can get. These pictures were taken on the morning of November 13, 2021. Around noon, the first of the ?atmospheric river?
Overtorqued
I don?t write much about really personal stuff, but in recent years there have been mild-to-serious mental-health issues affecting my immediate and extended family. As a consequence I have uneducated ideas about evolution and mental health to offer. And with them, for comfort, photographs of a beautiful garden. A member of the extended family, let?s call them FC, stayed with us for a while in September because their immediate family needed to go overseas and it?s not OK for them to travel internationally or be alone in the house. Also we are happy to have FC visit, because they are cool and oddly erudite and charming.
Blah, Blah, Blah, Boom
COP26 is winding down, and I think nobody can seriously disagree with Greta Thunberg?s take: ?Blah, blah, blah.? And then she continued ?The real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever.? I wonder: What form does that ?real work? take? Well, I just finished reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm, which doesn?t include instructions for blowing up pipelines but argues that that Real Work should include infrastructure destruction. It?s a good book, and if you (like me) are horrified at the onrushing climate catastrophe and enraged at our leaders?
Diablo Immortal
I tried out Diablo Immortal on my Galaxy Tab 7+ and, well, it?s pretty convincing off the top. But I wonder if it?s ethical to play anything from Blizzard, these days? Protip: At the moment you can?t get into the closed beta unless you?re on Android in Canada. History I?ve never been a serious gamer???often going months or years between playing anything at all. But Diablo is kind of an exception; back in D2 days I was in a pretty serious Amazon-focused guild and put in a lot of hours. Then a mere nine years ago I took a D3 Demon Hunter to level 60 and then at some more recent point I worked a Barbarian pretty deep on the PS4.
URI-based Integration
At the end of September, AWS announced a big new feature for its Step Functions product, and my tweet noting the announcement got a shocking number of impressions for something way out at the geeky end of Cloud tech. In retrospect, a design choice we made back in 2016 turns out to be working very well, and there?s a lesson to be learned here: If you need to integrate an arbitrarily large and and diverse set of software capabilities, URIs are the best integration glue. Background Step Functions launched in December 2016, and I did a whole lot of work on it.
Worst Case
Suppose you?re running your organization?s crucial apps in the cloud. Specifically, suppose you?re running them them on AWS, and in particular in the ?us-east-1? region? Could us-east-1 go away? What might you do about it? Let?s catastrophize! Acks & disclaimers First, thanks to Corey Quinn for this Twitter thread, which got me thinking. Second, while I worked for AWS for 5½ years, I?ve never been near a data center, nor do I have any inside information about the buildings, servers, or networking. On the other hand, I do have a decent understanding of AWS culture and capabilities in software engineering and operations.
Catharsis
It was just a minor story in the business section, nothing front-page. But when I heard (earlier in the day, from an insider), the news was cathartic; I had to stand up and take a walk. Summary: Amazon was about to find itself in court with the US National Labor Relations Board over the firing of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa; the event that caused me to walk away from the best job I ever had and a whole lot of money. On September 29th, Amazon avoided that trial by signing a humiliating out-of-court settlement.
Rock Decades
On Saturday September 25th, 2021, we went to a concert by Cousin Harley featuring Paul Pigat. The last live indoor music we?d seen was March 8, 2020, which is to say a gap of 566 days. Speaking of gaps, 2021 marks, more or less, both seventy years of Rock ?n? Roll and 50 years of my loving it. Weird coincidence: That last pre-Covid concert was by Coco Montoya ?and Paul Pigat?, my calendar says, but I?ll be honest, I remember almost nothing of that evening. Live at The Rickshaw.
Blueskid Demo
I?ve been in the conversation around Twitter?s @bluesky project, and last December I posted @bluesky Identity, a proposal for mapping between social-media identities based on public keys and signatures. Recently @bluesky announced the Satellite contest, whose goal is to take identities on three or more online properties and ?Link them in a way that anyone can verify you are the author/owner of all.? Which is more or less what @bluesky Identity is all about. So I pulled together a working demo called ?Blueskid? (GitHub). This is a quick walk-through of Blueskid.
Saving ?
Herewith a lost-pet story with (spoiler) a happy ending, starring a real bloodhound. Soon to be a major motion picture, I bet. Here?s the hound, who?s called Hunter. What happened was, we?ve been introducing our 9-month old cat ? (pronounced ?Thorn?, because reasons) to the great outdoors. This is hard to avoid because we have a back porch we eat most meals on when it?s nice, and it?s a pain in the butt to not have the door to it open. It?s been going great because ? is a cautious kind of cat. He skedaddles back inside or up a tree if a car goes down the road outside or someone drops a spoon on the floor or even sneezes.
LG C1
What happened was, our TV is ten years old and (following on some renovations) we could use one at the cabin for rainy winter evenings. So I bought a 48" LG C1 4K OLED screen (48" is the smallest in the C1 line), which is kind of this year?s hot TV. It?s not a life-changer, but the world of TV has shifted some in a decade, so here?s a dispatch from the front. Includes a pointer to a truly great TV stand. By the way, this thing seems to be on sale at all the big boxes, which is a little weird given the global supply-chain crunch.
How Much Range?
When someone wants to talk to me about my car, invariably the first question is some variation on ?How far can you go on a charge?? The next is ?How long does it take to charge?? Ladies, gentlemen, and other flavors, please take note. These questions are wrong. I?m here today to explain why, and suggest what the right ones are. [This piece provoked by my recent Trans-Canada driving experiment.] ?How far can you go on a charge?? For almost everyone, 95% of their driving is commuting and shopping and going to the gym or whatever.
CL XLI: Forest Stories
Recently I?ve had the joy and privilege of time spent walking in the Pacific Northwest forest, on a small island where we engage in Cottage Life.. Walking in the forest provides a fine opportunity to think, although the raw beauty of the forest pouring in through your eyes and ears will regularly interrupt. While forest-walking, I thought about pictures, modern mapping technology, strangers? identities, and The Green Knight movie. Snapping I have a problem: It?s hard to photograph the forest. Out of sheer embarrassment I won?t share the number of times a combination of light and space and color has brought the camera to my eye.
Apps Getting Worse
Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It?s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products. First, a few examples to clarify the kind of thing I?m talking about. These are just the ones I?ve had personal experience with. iPain One super-obvious example is the long, sad story of iPhoto and iMovie. For years after the introduction of iMovie ?08, you could still get and use the ?06 version and lots of people did, because it was simple, straightforward, and the obvious things you needed to do were always within reach.
Western Electric
At 6:30 PM on Wednesday August 4th my 15-year-old daughter and I pulled up the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in front of my 91-year-old Mom?s place in Regina, Saskatchewan. I was tired and achey because I?d just finished driving 1,725km (1,072 miles) across two days to see her for the first time since Covid started. I was happy to see Mom, happy about the first road-trip in a long time, and happy to have tested the hypothesis that, in 2021, a fully-electric vehicle can handle long-haul travel. My Mom, welcoming us to Saskatchewan. Normally she doesn?t look like the queen.
Long Links
Welcome to the August 1st edition of ?Long Links?, which assembles long-form pieces that I have the luxury of enjoying due to semi-retirement. Nobody with a real job has time to read all this stuff, but one or two items might enrich your life without burning too many minutes. Note: There was no July 1st Long Links because either I was busier or the world?s long-form authors less prolific in June. Highlights this time out: Taxing wealth, attacking Amazon, guitar music, and God. Many people have come to share the belief that the global distribution of wealth (and consequently, power) is so stupidly unequal as to be damaging to our economy and civic fabric.
CL XL: Under and Over
Wow, the last Cottage Life piece was in 2019, suggesting there was no such thing in 2020. And, what with Covid, there was less. While this story happened in situ, it?s really about something else: How much residential construction and software are like each other, and share the same really-important rule: Underpromise and overdeliver. [Includes compulsory nature shots.] You can tell that this is an exceptionally high tide. Enlargement What happened was, we decided our cabin (yes, that?s not the title of this blog series, but it?s what we say these days) needed to be bigger.
Music Notes
Herewith notes on what I?m listening to in 2021, and why that?s a problem. With recommendations both for music and for things we can do to keep it alive. Sometimes I listen to music on LPs???usually a combination of classical, elderly, and obscure. Otherwise these days it?s mostly YouTube Music (YTM). Which is very good at one of its jobs, namely finding me interesting music. But it?s terrible at its other job, which is being a constructive part of the music ecosystem. Pretty soon, Covid allowing, I?ll be adding another mode: Live concerts!
Where?s the Apple M2?
DPReview just published Apple still hasn't made a truly ?Pro? M1 Mac ? so what?s the holdup? Following on the good performance and awesome power efficiency of the Apple M1, there?s a hungry background rumble in Mac-land along the lines of ?Since the M1 is an entry-level chip, the next CPU is gonna blow everyone?s mind!? But it?s been eight months since the M1 shipped and we haven?t heard from Apple. I have a good guess what?s going on: It?s proving really hard to make a CPU (or SoC) that?s perceptibly faster than the M1.
Murderbot Diaries
I suffered a massive loss of productivity for a few days last week because I started reading the first of this series and found that I had to read them all pretty much without stopping. Several people on social media and in real life, people whose taste I respect, had recommended these books by Martha Wells, but to be honest I was put off by the title. Right at this point in time I?m not looking for dark dystopian ultraviolence. What happened was, Lauren found Network Effect (vol. 5) in one of the local Little Free Libraries and raved, so we both went back to the start and moved on from there.
Shorting Bitcoin
I just bought put options on MicroStrategy ($MSTR), Coinbase ($COIN), and Purpose Bitcoin ETF ($BTCC-B.TO), all at a strike price not far off the current (late June) price, expiring around Christmas. Here?s the thinking. Context But first: This is part of this blog?s Investing theme, whose Intro makes it clear that I have no investment expertise and nobody should take this as investment advice, because it?s not. It?s just a bloggy disclosure of some of my own financial positions, which I owe readers anyhow.
Investing Intro
We?ve started to actively manage some of our family investments. It?s entertaining me, and I notice people really like talking about money, so why not talk about it here? This is the start of a new blog category. [Important: I have no training or expertise in managing money, am not trying to influence or convince anyone, and you would be very foolish to treat this as investment advice, because it isn?t.] [Also important: I think it?s important that you know about the financial interests of anyone whose words you?re reading, and any potential conflicts of interest.
Galaxy Tab S7+
I impulse-bought this big Samsung slab which I guess represents the state of the art in Android tabletry and is trying to occupy an iPad-like spot in the ecosystem. It?s got issues but I?m keeping it. I?m writing this based on my perception that not many people have a tablet that?s not an iPad, so the territory is only lightly explored. Credit is due to Nelson Minar, who has a sort-of-blog where he diarizes his personal tech divagations. It was his short, to-the-point piece on the S7+ that awoke the impulse and got me here.
Long Links
Welcome to the June 2021 issue of Long Links, in which I curate long-form works that I enjoyed last month. Even if you think all these look interesting, you probably don?t have time to read them assuming you have a job, which I don?t. My hope is that one or two will reward your attention. Has an Old Soviet Mystery at Last Been Solved????they?re talking about the Dyatlov Pass incident, which has provided fuel for mystery-lovers and conspiracy nuts for a half-century now. If you?ve not heard the Dyatlov story you might want to read this anyhow because it?s colorful and fearful.
Sixteen Classics
I just finished writing about the process of, and lessons from, processing 900 inherited LPs into my collection. I thought it wouldn?t be fair to stay meta, so here is a handful of my favorites from among the new arrivals. Yes, they are all music by dead white men, performed by other dead white men (and a couple of women). Sorry. They were released between 1953 and 1978. You can buy these online at discogs.com but I don?t recommend it because Discogs is sleazy, or on eBay, but I don?t recommend that either.
LP Victory
Some readers may remember a February 2019 blog post describing how I inherited 900 or so used LPs, mostly classical. As of this week, I?ve listened to all of them (or rejected them out of hand), and kept 220 or so (counting methods were imperfect). Herewith lessons and reconfigurations. Also there?s a companion piece on sixteen albums I especially liked. The ritual First of all, I just want to say how much I?ve enjoyed this. It was a late-evening thing, usually the kids away from the big room, so just Lauren and me or sometimes just me.
It?s Bad
As we?ve slogged through Trump and carbon-loading and Covid, I?ve managed to remain more or less un-depressed and find enough gratifications in day-to-day life to keep the black dog of despair at a distance. But this morning I woke up early and, while the household slept, read most of the May 15th issue of The Economist. And folks, with a very few exceptions, it was pretty well all bad news. I feel an obligation to pass this summary along with a plea: As we relax slowly into post-Covid, maybe try to find a bit of extra energy and put it into politics or philanthropy or some other way to mitigate the awfulness.
Testing in the Twenties
Grown-up software developers know perfectly well that testing is important. But???speaking here from experience???many aren?t doing enough. So I?m here to bang the testing drum, which our profession shouldn?t need to hear but apparently does. This was provoked by two Twitter threads (here and here) from Justin Searls, from which a couple of quotes: ?almost all the advice you hear about software testing is bad. It?s either bad on its face or it leads to bad outcomes or it distracts by focusing on the wrong thing (usually tools)?
Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it?s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they?re making Greta Thunberg justifiably angry at them. Hm, this piece got kind of long. Spoiler: I?m here mostly to talk about electric hydrofoil boats from Candela, in Sweden, which look like a genuinely new thing in the world.
Multimodality
My Wednesday consisted mostly of running around and moving things. I used five transport modes and now I can?t not think about environmental impact and practicality and urban futures. Hop on board the car-share, boat, electric car, bus, and bike, and come along for the ride. Background What happened was, on Wednesday morning our boat was at the boatyard for a minor repair. They?d squeezed me in on the condition that I show up at 8AM to sail it away???they?re pretty well maxed out this time of year when everyone wants to get back on the water.
Amazon Q1 2021
Amazon announced their financial results for the January to March quarter last Thursday. I was reading them when an email popped up asking if I wanted to talk about them on CNBC Squawk, which I did. In preparation, I re-read the report and pulled together a few talking points; here they are. Top line Amazon?s gross revenue increased 41% year-over-year, to $108.5B. To use a technical term: HOLY SHIT! This sort of growth on that sort of base is mind-boggling. Granted, shoppers suffering from Covid coop-up played a substantial role.
Long Links
Welcome once again to Long Links, a monthly curation of long-form pieces that pleased and educated me and that being semi-retired gives me time to enjoy; offered in the hope that one or two might enrich the lives of busier people. It?s simple (and accurate) to say that Xi Jinping?s regime is barbaric, obscurantist, and brutal, and that the people of China are badly mis-governed. That given, the place is interesting; I for one am continuously astonished that they manage to hold it all together. Maria Repnikova on How China Tells its Story dives deep on this; on the very-grey line between what can and can?t be said, what Chinese propagandists think it is they?re trying to do, and (especially) the differences between the Chinese and Russian approaches to storytelling.
Twilights
I went out for a walk well into twilight time, put the camera in see-in-the-dark mode, fitted a fast friendly lens, and pointed it at pretty things. This is in Eastern Vancouver (?East Van? everyone says), around where Riley Park becomes Mount Pleasant. A lot of the houses are old and, what with Vancouver?s real-estate craziness, probably doomed. Sadly, they won?t be missed very much I suspect. It?s awfully nice of people to put up lights simply for the enjoyment of light. Modern cameras, what can I say. Just set the ISO at 12800, free the lens to find whatever aperture keeps the shutter less than 40 or so, and you effortlessly get all these moody shots that would have been simply impossible for any previous generation of photographers.
Algorithm Agility?
What happened was, I was fooling around with zero-knowledge proof ideas and needed to post public keys on the Internet in textual form. I picked ed25519 keys (elliptic-curve, also known as EdDSA) so I asked the Internet ?How do you turn ed25519 keys into short text strings?? The answer took quite a bit of work to find and, after I posted it, provoked a discussion about whether I was doing the right thing. So today?s question is: Should these things be encoded with the traditional PKIX/PEM serialization, or should developers just blast the key-bits into base64 and ship that?
How to Interchange Ed25519 Keys
Herewith pointers to Java 15 and Go code that converts Ed25119 public keys back and forth between short text strings and key objects you can use to verify signatures. The code isn?t big or complicated, but it took me quite a bit of work and time to figure out, and led down surprisingly dusty and ancient pathways. Posted to help others who need to do this and perhaps provide mild entertainment. [Update 04/23: ?agwa? over at YCombinator showed how to simplify the Go with x509.MarshalPKIXPublicKey and x509.ParsePKIXPublicKey.] They call modern crypto ?public-key?; because keys are public, people can post them on the Internet so other people?s code can use them, for example to verify signatures.
Spring Flowers, 2021
48 hours ago I got my first Covid-19 vaccine dose, and today I took the camera for a stroll, hunting spring flowers. What a long strange trip it?s been. Should I be concerned that the drugstore guy didn?t bother to sign? By the way, CHADOX1-S RECOMBINANT is better known as Astra Zeneca. Vaccinated how? They?re currently working their way through really old people and other targeted groups like teachers and some industrial workers with the Pfizer and Moderna. There seem to be a fair number of AZ doses arriving, and they?re not recommended for people under 55.
The Sacred ?Back? Button
Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn?t have a way to ?Go Back?. This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It?s a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let?s demand perfection. Why it matters Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won?t, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out.
Long Links
Welcome to the monthly ?Long Links? post for March 2021, in which I take advantage of my lightly-employed status to curate a list of pointers to good long-form stuff that I have time to savor but you probably don?t, but which you might enjoy one or two of. This month there?s lots of video, a heavier focus on music, and some talk about my former employer. What with everything else happening in the world, people who are outside of Australia may not have noticed that they had a nasty sex scandal recently. My sympathy to the victims, and my admiration goes out to Australian of the Year Grace Tame's full National Press Club address, which is searing and heart-wrenching.
Topfew+Amdahl.next
I?m in fast-follow mode here, with more Topfew reportage. Previous chapters (reverse chrono order) here, here, and here. Fortunately I?m not going to need 3500 words this time, but you probably need to have read the most recent chapter for this to make sense. Tl;dr: It?s a whole lot faster now, mostly due to work from Simon Fell. My feeling now is that the code is up against the limits and I?d be surprised if any implementation were noticeably faster. Not saying it won?t happen, just that I?d be surprised.
Topfew and Amdahl
On and off this past year, I?ve been fooling around with a program called Topfew (GitHub link), blogging about it in Topfew fun and More Topfew Fun. I?ve just finished adding a few nifty features and making it much faster; I?m here today first to say what?s new, and then to think out loud about concurrent data processing, Go vs Rust, and Amdahl?s Law, of which I have a really nice graphical representation. Apologies because this is kind of long, but I suspect that most people who are interested in either are interested in both.
xmlwf -k
What happened was, I needed a small improvement to Expat, probably the most widely-used XML parsing engine on the planet, so I coded it up and sent off a PR and it?s now in release 2.3.0. There?s nothing terribly interesting about the problem or the solution, but it certainly made me think about coding and tooling and so on. (Warning: Of zero interest to anyone who isn?t a professional programmer.) Back story As I mentioned last month, I took a little programming job partly as a favor to a friend, of writing a parser to transmute a huge number of antique IBM GML files into XML.
Three Million Meters on e-Wheels
This is just another round of cheerleading for e-bikes, provoked by my odometer clicking over to three thousand km. Granted, not amazing for twenty months of commuting, but not nothing. For anyone in an even marginally urban situation in reasonable health, if you don?t have one of these, you?re really missing a trick. For earlier raving about this vehicle, see here. March flowers by False Creek. More interesting than 3000, and prime. Capital cost: Noticeable but much less than anything with a motor. Fuel cost: Damn close to zero. Parking cost: Free. Health cost: Negative.
Long Links
Welcome to the monthly tour of long-form excellence that I, due to being semi-retired, have the time to read. You probably don?t have that kind of time but one or two of these might brighten your day anyhow. Katie Mack, an Astrophysics professor, is one of our best science writers; her book The End of Everything is definitely on my to-read list. The American Institute of Physics has a long interview with her which I found interesting as a sort of mini-autobiography of a life in science. Touches on issues of cosmology, communication, and diversity.
Meet ?
Months into the cold wet Pacific-Northwest Dark Season and our cat, a charming 4-year-old calico, has been bored and fretful. The obvious solution: Get her a kitten! Easier said than done, let me tell ya. But it?s done. The little feline fluffball?s name is Thorn, spelt ???. More on that below. This announcement has been delayed because obviously one must have pictures and little ? is a challenge to photograph. But, finally? We?ve wanted a kitten for a long time. When we acquired our current cat, a one-year-old rescue who?d already had kittens, they discouraged us from adopting two at a time: ?She?s fierce, and mean to other cats?
Sea Island
Not the most original name, granted. It?s wedged into the middle of Greater Vancouver?s western oceanfront and is mostly occupied by our airport and its apparatuses. But there are a couple of decent parks, and on a greyish February day they yielded fresh air, smiles, and a harvest of photographs. This particular season of this particular year, we?ll take what we can get. McDonald Park It?s wedged in between the airport and the north branch of the mighty Fraser River, whose existence is a big part of the reason Vancouver exists. It?s low-key and old-school.
Recent Code
I?ve been programming and remembering how much fun it is. With nostalgia for Old Data and thoughts on my work at AWS. Old-School What happened was, I was talking to a friend who?s in the middle of a big project; they said ?Would you be interested in bashing out a quick parser in Java?? ?Parser for what?? I asked. ?GML?. I just about sprayed coffee on my computer. ?You have got to be kidding. There hasn?t been any GML since the days of mainframes.? ?Exactly. They?re migrating the documents off the mainframe.?
Jassy Talking Points
Following on Tuesday?s big succession announcement at Amazon, I was apparently the only human who?d been in a room with Andy Jassy more than once in recent years and was willing to talk to media. By about the fifth conversation, my talking points were stubs because the points wore off, leaving a well-polished gleam. So I might as well share them directly. If you?ve read any of the other articles this may sound familiar. I should be clear that I?m not exactly close to Andy Jassy??? I?ve only ever been in the room with him at decision meetings and annual planning reviews; maybe a dozen times in my 5½ years there.
Long Links
Welcome to the Long Links look-back at January 2021. Once again I assemble long-form pieces that I?m fortunate enough to have time for due to my lightly-employed condition. Probably few have time (or inclination) to plow through all this stuff, but one or two might reward your time. I can?t imagine anyone reasonably literate not having enjoyed reading John Le Carré, and I really enjoyed My Dinners with le Carré. It seems like he was a very decent and very impressive human being. I neglected to read a few of his later books but I?ll go back and do so.
Late Plague Winter
The first time I posted the first crocuses on this blog was in 2003. And then a lot of times since then. It?s therapeutic; I may be a Canadian and happy about it, but damn I hate winter. Here at Canada?s bottom left corner we don?t get the brutal cold but also we don?t get much winter light, so sun on petals is a morale-booster. And do we ever need one this particular winter. The little guy above is awfully cute, sneaking into the sun. The flowers are early this year; they usually don?t show till sometime in February.
When You Know
I?m a person who knows a lot about how computers and software work, is generally curious, and reads fast. I?ve been wrong about lots of things over the years. But there have a been a few times when a combination of technology-literacy and just paying attention to the world have made me 100% sure that I was seeing something coming that many others weren?t. Here are a few of those stories. The reason I?m telling them is that I?m in another of those moments, seeing something obvious that not enough other people have, and I want to offer credentials before I share it.
Long Links
Happy new year! Welcome to the first Long Links of 2021; this is a monthly curation of long-form pieces that I, due to being semiretired, have time to read. Probably, most people reading this have less time, but perhaps one or two will add value even for a busy person. The last month of the year is an invitation to best-of pieces. Music is probably my chief recreation so I?m a sucker for for this kind of piece. In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich?s The Best Music of 2020 showed me a couple of musical paths I hadn?t been aware of.
Late-2020 EV Charging in Canada
I haven?t seen my 90-year-old mother since January. I guess by mid-year both she and I are likely to be vaccinated so maybe I could go visit. I?d rather drive than fly. What with Covid I?ve been cooped up so long I could scream, so there are few things I?d rather do than get out on the highway. As a displacement activity I?ve been working out how I could get the electric Jaguar 1734 kilometres from Vancouver to Saskatchewan to see her. Thus this quick survey of the state of the infrastructure in Western Canada, and also trip-planning tools.
2020 in a Difficult Lens
I?ve said this before in passing, but I?m becoming passionate about it. Increasingly, I believe that if you go out for a walk with a camera, you should consider attaching a difficult, opinionated lens and just leaving it on. Herewith a gallery of ten 2020 photos taken with such a lens, interspersed with preaching on the subject. A windy March 15th on English Bay, the part of the Pacific closest to Vancouver and what you find yourself in when your boat goes under the bridge and out of protection. It is frequently the subject of grumpy remarks from boaters concerning its tendency to nasty crosscutting waves.
Hot Winter Tabbouleh
This is a recipe I dreamed up that has pleased the family twice now. It?s pretty easy to make and has lots of room for creative variation. The name is probably controversial. Let me lead off with a picture. Wikipedia says Tabbouleh is Levantine but I grew up in Lebanon and I?ve never had really first-rate Tabbouleh anywhere else, except for the version my Mom makes. Tabbouleh is a salad centered around parsley, bulgur, and tomatoes. What happened was, I had bacon that I was going to make breakfast with but didn?t, and it was my turn to make dinner.
@bluesky Identity
Twitter announced Project @bluesky back in December 2019. I blogged about it supportively then reached out saying I was interested, and was invited to join the conversation; thanks! Several of us offered proposals; this is part of mine, concerned with how identity might work in a world of diverse federated social networks. Goal On the Internet, there are many entities that provide online conversations, whether short-form like Twitter or bulletin-board-esque like Reddit. Then there are a nearly infinite number of specialized communities, for photographers, dog groomers, and the owners of particular types of boats or cameras.
Long Links
Welcome to the Long Links offering for November 2020, in which I take advantage of my lightly-employed status to recommend a list of long-form works that I had time to consume, acknowledging that while you probably don?t, one or two of them might reward the time it would take you to absorb. This month?s highlights: Election rear-views, Siberia, blueswomen, the Orlando NBA bubble, and a lovely lecture about software and music. As you might have heard, there?s this large Anglophone country south of Canada where they had an election last month. The next few long-form recommendations consider what it might have meant.
Editing Francesca
This is a story about researching Russian music, about Italian adulterers in Hell, and about pulp sci-fi featuring fairy-cursed princesses. To be honest, it?s largely about editing Wikipedia, why it?s fun and rewarding and maybe you should too. What happened was, on Friday there was a Twitter challenge: ?What's a great song that is over 10 minutes in length?? I replied ?Francesca da Rimini? and without thinking too much switched over to YouTube and, since I was about done with things and ready for bed, dialed up this pretty good performance by Igor Manasherov and the Moscow Philharmonic.
The Devourers
I was reading yet another lament at the death of a much-loved publication because advertising doesn?t work any more and they couldn?t execute the pivot to subscription (fewer and fewer can). Ads no longer work because of the Google/Facebook duopoly; suddenly I was thinking ?This reminds me of something.? After wandering the dusty back corridors of memory I came up with names that will be familiar to a few oldsters: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. No, really. Our Heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, heroes both, appeared in stories written by Fritz Leiber between 1939 and 1988 (!)
Facebook Market
In the last few days my fear of Facebook has been ramping and in my mind the case for breaking it up got stronger. What happened was, I sold the old family minivan on Facebook Marketplace and it?s a juggernaut. We bought a reasonably-well-equipped Honda Odyssey in 2007, a few months after our second child was born. Minivans, they really do the trick when you?ve got multiple kids. It?s carried little-league teams and birthday parties and construction materials and everything the family needs at the cabin for a week. It?s taken the two-day drive over the mountains and across the Prairies to Saskatchewan, twice.
Long Links
This is the fifth ?Long Links? episode, a monthly curation of good long-form essays from around the Internet that nobody who (unlike me) has an actual job has time to read all of. A glance through this might turn up one or two pieces that would reward even a busy person?s time. [Geeks only.] Microservices ? architecture nihilism in minimalism?s clothes, by Vasco Figueira, comes with a provocative title and really a whole lot of different angles on the problem. I certainly don?t agree with all of his conclusions, but some of the angles are new to me and I suspect would be to others as well.
Autumn Yellow
This is my least favorite of the seasons, because I can?t help thinking of the looming cold and dark. This weekend???when the timeshift robs us of an hour of late light???feels particularly onerous. But you have to admire those trees. I?m still shooting with the the Fujifilm X-T30. My honeymoon with this eighteen-month-old camera is somewhat over. I miss the mammoth electronic viewfinder of the flagship X-T models and the minimal grace of the X-E models. For pictures like the ones in this fragment, I think of the mighty GFX100 and big poster-sized prints.
Google Antitrust Notes
I just read the US antitrust ?Complaint? against Google. This is obviously just the first chapter of a very long story, but here are early observations. Don?t get upset that this is going to take years to work through. Figuring out how to unclench Google?s stranglehold on the Internet wouldn?t be easy even without their army of excellent lawyers fighting tooth and claw every step of the way, which they will be. It?s still worth doing. I found the Complaint document to be well-written and well-argued. You don?t need to be an antitrust attorney, or any kind of lawyer at all, to understand its argument.
Trickster
This is a recommendation for 2½ books and a just-launched TV series, and for the books? author, Eden Robinson. As a consequence of watching the TV pilot I?m now re-reading the books, which is strong testimony. While this is pretty Canadian stuff, I think the story of a disadvantaged and hard-pressed young aboriginal person, lost in strange spaces, would resonate in plenty of other landscapes. Anyhow, it?s dark and entertaining, with sex and drugs and rock ?n? roll and supernatural creatures you would not want to meet on a dark night. These are page-turners, keep-you-up-too-late stuff.
Long Links
Welcome to the fourth monthly ?Long Links? instalment, in which I take advantage of my lightly-employed status to enjoy high-quality long-form pieces and point out a few that seem worthwhile in the hope that you might fit one or two into your busier lives. Truth has long been one of my obsessions and is a recurring theme in this blog. I?m contemplating something really long-form on the subject. It occurred to me that there might be a Wikipedia entry on Truth and wow, is there ever. I enjoyed reading it. The only systems of thought I know of that dare a claim to dispense absolute truth are religions.
I Hate My MacBook
In March I bought a 16" MacBook Pro, reasonably well tricked out: 2.3GHz 8-core Intel i9, 32G RAM, Radeon 5500M with 8G, 4T of disk. I hate it. It is slow and buggy enough that I wonder if maybe it?s a lemon? Herewith the gripes, for no particular reason other than it makes me feel like shouting at the world. Bluetooth It?s lame. I tried to broadcast music to the audio system in my boat and it sounds like dogshit and disconnects all the time. The car/boat audio guy said ?Oh yeah, everyone knows the Mac Bluetooth is useless.?
Won?t Subscribe
Since I?m lightly employed these days, I enjoy keeping up with the news. In recent weeks, I?ve been blocked by the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal, Globe & Mail (closest thing Canada has to a national newspaper), the Times/Sunday Times (of London), the Telegraph (also UK), Business Insider, and Bloomberg. Recently I got a bit of inside info on how these publications think about the economics, and I?m here to explain why they?re wrong. Background As a family we already subscribe to the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Vancouver Sun, the Economist, Talking Points Memo, Heated, and The Tyee.
Workflows in AWS and GCP
Recently, Google launched a beta of Google Cloud Workflows. This grabs my attention because I did a lot of work on AWS Step Functions, also a workflow service. The differences between them are super interesting, if you?re among the handful of humans who care about workflows in the cloud. For those among the other 7.8 billion, move right along, nothing to see here. Context The Google launch seemed a bit subdued. There was an August 27th tweet by Product Manager Filip Knapik, but the real ?announcement? is apparently Serverless workflows in Google Cloud, a 16-minute YouTube preso also by Knapik.
Slow Drone Soar
I recently invited you to read a thousand-page novel without much in the way of sentences, so I think it?s perfectly reasonable to point you at a 69-minute drone-metal album that largely lacks melody and rhythm. I refer to Life Metal, a 2019 release from Sunn O))). Because in 2020 we really ought to be sharing good things with each other, and this is a good thing; the new music I?ve enjoyed most this year. Lots of people probably don?t think they?d like drone metal, just from the name.
Long Links
I seem to have fallen into a monthly rhythm of posting pointers to what I think are high-quality long-form pieces. One of the best things about not having a job as such is that I have time to read these things. My assumption is that most of you don?t, but that maybe one or two will reward an investment of your limited time. In The New Yorker, Jane Hu writes The Second Act of Social-Media Activism, subtitled ?Has the Internet become better at mediating change?? People like me would like to believe this; back when the Arab Spring was first a thing, we did.
Studying Water
I have the good fortune to live in a seafront city, the further fortune to travel often by boat to a cabin by ocean?s edge, and still further, to work in a boat/office, many hours a week within arm?s reach of salt water. The water exhibits mysteries and tells me things I don?t understand but would love, given another lifetime, to study. The sea?s surface is never uniform, always patterned. I assume the patterns reflect the effects of wind and tide, but not how, nor what message they?re trying to send. I?m pretty sure that the motorboats that crisscross the open water leave long-lasting traces on the surface patterns.
Welcome to the Podcast
I was wondering if podcasting is still a thing, so I tweeted ?When do people listen to podcasts, now that nobody is commuting? Housework? Exercise?? Newsflash: Yes, it is. The tweet got lots of traction and only very few of the responses said they were listening less. Given that, I decided to make an audio version of what you are reading and call it a podcast. Turns out to be pretty easy. Details It?s here on Apple podcasts, which I gather means it will show up on Overcast and other podcast aggregators (um, whatever they are, I?m new to this) soon.
, the fact that...
I?ve been reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann since January of this year and finished it earlier this evening. I?ve taken breaks from it to read other books and quit my job and launch a sideline in activism. The book is over a thousand pages long and mostly composed of a single sentence, an endless flow of phrases many introduced by , the fact that? I enjoyed it a whole lot! While most people won?t be eager to wade into something this big and complicated, the fact that it?s OK to take months and months to wander through it may make the idea less intimidating.
Yalochat
There?s financing news today: Yalochat closed a $15M B Round from B Capital, with follow-on from Sierra Ventures. The reason I?m writing this is that I?ve signed on as an advisor to Yalo; they?re a fun outfit and it?s an interesting story. Also, they?re hiring. I?m not going to explain what Yalo does; their website will fill you in on that, and the the TechCrunch coverage of the funding is a useful introduction. What happened was, a long-time colleague whose judgment I respect reached out and said ?I?m helping these guys with product issues but they could really use advice on the engineering side.?
Cloud Traffic
I recently watched Build an enterprise-grade service mesh with Traffic Director, featuring Stewart Reichling and Kelsey Hightower of GCP, and of course Google Cloud?s Traffic Director. Coming at this with a brain steeped in 5½ years of AWS technology and culture was surprising in ways that seem worth sharing. Stewart presents the problem of a retail app?s shopping-cart checkout code. Obviously, first you need to call a payment service. However it?s implemented, this needs to be a synchronous call because you?re not going to start any fulfillment work until you know the payment is OK.
Long Links
Back in early July I posted ten links to long-form pieces that I?d had a chance to enjoy because of not having one of those nasty ?full-time-job? things. I see that the browser tabs are bulking up again, so here we go. Just like last time, people with anything resembling a ?life? probably don?t have time for all of them, but if a few pick a juicy-looking essay to enjoy, that?ll have made it worthwhile. The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free by Nathan J. Robinson. I think we?ve all sort of realized that the assertion in the title is true.
Not an Amazon Problem
The NY Times profile quotes me saying ?We don?t really have an Amazon problem. What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.? But the URL contained the string ?amazon-critic-tim-bray? and the HTML <title> says ?Tim Bray Is Not Done With Amazon?. I feel like I?m being pigeonholed and I don?t like it. I am totally not some sort of anti-Amazon obsessive. And I am done with Amazon; even though I?m doubtless on a dozen internal enemies lists, I have no real interest in giving the company, specifically, a hard time.
Polishing Lawrence
I edit Wikipedia as a hobby, and recommend that hobby. (Fifteen or so years ago I was an early defender in the days when many scoffed at the Wikipedia idea.) I spent much of this past weekend on a long-running editing project, the entry for T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. When I finished up on Monday I felt like a milestone had been passed so I decided to share, because the story behind it seemed worth telling. If you want the facts about Lawrence, go read the entry, it?s not that long.
Safari Tabs Are Weird
Recently I switched from Chrome to Safari because on a 2019 16" MacBook Pro, Chrome has nasty video glitches; apparently Apple and Google are blaming each other for the problem. My first impression of Safari is decent, subjectively it feels faster than Chrome. But browser tabs act in ways that that feel somewhere between ?weird? and ?badly broken?. Here are a few of the issues I?ve encountered. Tab display On Chrome, if you have a lot of tabs???I typically have 20 or 30 open???they get narrower and narrower and until completely crushed out of existence show a little glimpse of icon and label, so you can find what you?re looking for.
Long Links
Having recently quit my job, I have more spare time than I used to. A surprising amount of it has been dedicated to reading longer-form articles, mostly about politics and society, but only mostly. I miss my job but I sure have enjoyed the chance to stretch out my mind in new directions. There are plenty of things in the world that need more than a thousand words to talk about. Anyhow, here is a set of lightly-annotated links that people who still have jobs almost certainly won?t have time to read all of.
Just Too Efficient
On a Spring 2019 walk in Beijing I saw two street sweepers at a sunny corner. They were beat-up looking and grizzled but probably younger than me. They?d paused work to smoke and talk. One told a story; the other?s eyes widened and then he laughed so hard he had to bend over, leaning on his broom. I suspect their jobs and pay were lousy and their lives constrained in ways I can?t imagine. But they had time to smoke a cigarette and crack a joke. You know what that?s called?
More Topfew Fun
Back in May I wrote a little command-line utility called Topfew (GitHub). It was fun to write, and faster than the shell incantation it replaced. Dirkjan Ochtman dropped in a comment noting that he?d written Topfew along the same lines but in in Rust (GitHub) and that it was 2.86 times faster; at GitHub, the README now says that with a few optimizations it?s now 6.7x faster. I found this puzzling and annoying so I did some optimization too, encountering surprises along the way. You already know whether you?re the kind of person who wants to read the rest of this.
Oboe to Ida
What happened was, I was listening to an (at least) fifty-year old LP, a classical collection entitled The Virtuoso Oboe; it?s what the title says. The music was nothing to write home about but led into a maze of twisty little passages that ended with me admiring the life of a glamorous Russian bisexual Jewish ballerina heiress who?s famous for? well, we?ll get to that. Regular readers know that I have a background task???working through an inherited trove of 900 mostly-classical LPs. In that piece I said I was going to blog my way through the collection but I haven?t, which is probably OK.
Break Up Google
It?s easy to say ?Break up Big Tech companies!? Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google. Where?s the money? Google?s published financials are annoyingly opaque. They break out a few segments but (unlike Amazon) only by revenue, there?s nothing about profitability. Still, the distribution is interesting. I collated the percentages back to Q1 2018: Ads on GoogleAds off GoogleAds on YouTubeCloudOther 2018 Q170.97%14.84%??14.19% 2018 Q271.69%14.77%??13.54% 2018 Q371.73%14.58%??13.69% 2018 Q469.05%14.32%??16.62% 2019 Q170.99%13.81%??14.92% 2019 Q270.36%13.66%??15.98% ...
A-Cloud PR/FAQ
I?d like to see AWS split off from the rest of Amazon and I?m pretty sure I?m not alone. So to help that happen, I?ve drafted a PR/FAQ and posted it on GitHub so that it can be improved. People who know what a PR/FAQ is and why this might be helpful can hop on over and critique the doc. For the rest, herewith background and explanation on the what, why, and how. A project needs a name and so does a company. For the purposes of this draft I?m using ?A-Cloud? for both. Why spin off AWS?
AWS?s Share of Amazon?s Profit
I?ve often heard it said that AWS is a major contributor to Amazon?s profitability. How major? Here?s a graph covering the last nine quarters, with a brief methodology discussion: I think this is a useful number to observe as time goes by, and it would be good if we generally agree on how to compute it. So here?s how I did it. Start at the Quarterly Results page at ir.amazon.com. It only has data back through 2018 which seems like enough history for this purpose. Let?s take a walk through, for example, the Q1 2020 numbers.
Anti-Monopoly Thinking
I recently read The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn. For a decade or two now I?ve felt the economy is over-concentrated and in recent years I?ve been super-concerned about concentration of market power in the Big-Tech sector where I?ve earned my living. Reading this book has reinforced that concern and been very helpful in introducing new angles on how to think about monopoly. The issue is central to the travails and triumphs of 21st-century Capitalism and if you care about that, you might want to read it too.
At CRAB Park
On an errand, we felt the need to be outside near the sea. The closest opportunity was CRAB Park (see here). We hadn?t planned on visiting a homeless encampment but did that too. I seriously recommend the experience. Also I got pleasant pictures to accompany the story. CRAB is the nearest green waterfront to Vancouver?s Downtown Eastside which means some of the people you see have been considerably damaged by what we call ?civilization?, and show it. it?s also real close to the Port of Vancouver, third-largest in North America and biggest in Canada (only 29th in the world).
Topfew Fun
This was a long weekend in Canada; since I?m unemployed and have no workaday cares, I should have plenty of time to do family stuff. And I did. But I also got interested in a small programming problem and, over the course of the weekend, built a tiny tool called topfew. It does a thing you can already do, only faster, which is what I wanted. But I remain puzzled. [To those who are interested in Amazon or politics or photography, feel free to skip this. I?ll come back to those things.] What it does Back in 2016 I tweeted Hello "sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head" my old friend, and got a few smiles.
Meta Blog
My recent Amazon-exit piece got an order of magnitude more traffic then even the post popular outings here normally do. Which turned my mind to thoughts of blogging in 2020, the why and how of the thing. Here they are, along with hit-counts and referer data from last week. Probably skip this unless you?re interested in social-media dynamics and/or publishing technology. Numbers In the first week after publication, Bye, Amazon was read somewhat more than 614,669 times by a human (notes on the uncertainty below). The referers with more than 1% of that total were Twitter (18.13%), Hacker News (17.09%), Facebok (10.55%), Google (4.29%), Vice (3.40%), Reddit(1.66%), and CNBC (1.09%).
Responses
Boy, when your I?m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. This was via email, Twitter DMs, blog comments, and LinkedIn messages. All of which went completely batshit. So, some answers. But first? Thanks for the kind words! I had no notion how the world might react to a cranky old overpaid geek?s public temper tantrum. The world?s been astonishingly warm and welcoming. Apparently I hit a hot button I didn?t know existed. The crankiest geek on the planet couldn?t fail to have their heart warmed.
Bye, Amazon
May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I?ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I?m pretty blue. What happened Last year, Amazonians on the tech side banded together as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), first coming to the world?s notice with an open letter promoting a shareholders?
Mac Migration Pain
What happened was, my backpack got stolen with my work and personal Macs inside. The work machine migrated effortlessly but I just finished up multiple days of anguish getting the personal machine going and thought I?d blog it while it was fresh in my mind. This might be helpful to others, either now or maybe later at the end of a Web search. But hey, I?m typing this ongoing fragment on it, so the story had a happy ending. And to compensate for its length and sadness, I?ll give it a happy beginning; two, in fact. Happy corporate The IT guys were excellent, they?re in quarantine mode too but somehow arranged on two hours?
Early 2020 Mac Upgrades
With notes on microphones, Apple?s Magic Keyboard, laptop stands, and my [gasp!] new email client, MailMate. Suddenly we?re all working from home. Ours isn?t that big???in particular, only one office???and there are three other people working or studenting from it, so instead I?ve been using our boat. It?s cramped but scenic. As the number of weeks that I?ll be doing this stretches out into the unknowable future, there?s a chance for geek accessorization! I believe that in these days those of us who still have incomes should make a little effort to spread it around, especially when it might boost our productivity a bit, or anyhow our morale.
Plague Journal, April 4
I?m an optimist so I don?t put the year in the title. Once again: Writing is therapeutic. Open up whatever program you use to write stuff in, and see what comes out. Today?s adventure was the Socially Distanced Farmers? Market. They were organized as hell, the market subdivided into three Zones, each with its own line-up, social distance chalked on the sidewalk. The people density was unusually high in the neighborhood and a lot of people have started just walking down the middle of the street, screw the motorists. I find this cheering. People are so open and friendly!
MacOS Lore, Early 2020
I?ve used a Mac for an extremely long time; long enough that this blog?s topic tag is Mac OS X, what macOS used to be called. Herewith a looking-back summary. Previously on Mac Lore? Clicking on that ?Mac OS X? link cost me a half hour rat-holing on my journey over the years. So you don?t have to, here?s a compendium of advice I give people about the Right Way To Do It; although some of the recommendations are not Mac-specific: Your screen is wider than it is high.
Plague Journal, April 2
Hey folks, one decent therapy for times like these when the world?s trying to drive you crazy is to tell your story; doesn?t matter if anyone?s listening. This is adapted from an email to the family that got kind of out of control. Write your own #PlagueJournal entries and I?ll read ?em. I feel vaguely like I?m setting a bad example as I cycle furiously on empty-ish streets across town each day to the boat and back; the smallest office I?ve ever had, but the view is decent. The weather remains obstinately wintry, temperature refusing to venture out of single digits, which is OK when the sun?s out which it mostly isn?t.
Facet: Push vs Pull
If you want to process events, you can fetch them from the infrastructure or you can have the infrastructure hand them to you. Neither idea is crazy. [This is part of the Event Facets series.] When you make a request to fetch data, that?s called ?pull?. Which is an off-by-one error; the ?u? should be an ?o? as in ?poll?, because that?s how most network stuff works. I?ve heard old farts of my own vintage claim that on the network, polling is really all there is if you dig in deep enough. But we do use the term ?push?, in which???maybe it?s just an illusion???the infrastructure reaches out and hands the event to you.
Plague Advice
A couple weeks back ?Social Distancing? would?ve been a Big Thinker?s title in The Times, about the Downside Of Facebook. Now it?s a best practice if you care about flattening the COVID-19 curve and saving grandmothers. I?m a believer; recently I tweeted Cancel Everything and I meant it. But this shouldn?t mean that you can?t go outside; or shop; or photograph. Plague Advice Go outside! Today we went to the Riley Park Winter Farmers Market, eleven blocks away in cold spring sun. Damn it was cold, 5°C at best. But I bought beets.
Facet: Broker vs Serverless
Your event infrastructure might be a service in the cloud or might be an actual computer (or cluster) you connect to. Both choices are perfectly sensible. The trade-offs? It?s complicated. [This is part of the Event Facets series.] At AWS where I work, our mainstream home-grown services (Kinesis, SQS, SNS) are all serverless. I mean, there are servers, lots of ?em, but you can?t see ?em, there?s just an endpoint that you connect to, usually with HTTP, to produce and consume events. Which should be unsurprising, AWS is built on the proposition that everything should be a service.
Facet: Point-to-Point vs Pub/Sub
When there?s an event in the cloud, how many different receivers can receive it? There are two plausible answers: Just one, or anyone. [This is part of the Event Facets series.] Point-to-point The idea is that any given message can only be read by one receiver. You might imagine that, as the old photo above suggests, the sender supplies an address, choosing the receiver. But that?s actually a pretty rare scenario. What?s much more common is the way that SQS works. In SQS, when you send a message, you have to pick which queue you?re sending it on.
Facet: Deduping
When you fire an event into the cloud, can you be sure it?ll only come out again once? It turns out that sometimes they come out more often than they go in. This may or may not be a problem in your application. If it is, there are techniques to help work around it. ?At-least once? This is a phrase you?ll hear a lot when you hang around with eventing/messaging people, (and cloud people generally). Builders work so hard at making sure everything gets delivered that they can end up doing it more than once. How can that happen?
Eventing Facets
What happened was, at re:Invent 2019 I gave a talk entitled Moving to Event-Driven Architecture, discussing a list of characteristics that distinguish eventing and messaging services. It was a lot of work pulling the material together and I?ve learned a couple of things since then; thus, welcome to the Eventing Facets blog series, of which this is the hub. It?s going to take a while to fill this out. Eventing or messaging? They?re just labels. If it?s publish-and-subscribe people usually say ?event?; if there?s a designated receiver, ?message?. But there?s a lot of messy ground in between; and in my experience, the software does more or less the same stuff whichever label?s on the cover.
Facet: FIFO
When you inject events into the cloud, do you care whether they come out in the same order they went in? If you do, you?ll be asking for ?FIFO? (rhymes with ?Fly, foe!?) (stands for ?First In First Out?) . Some software has it, some doesn?t. [This is part of the Event Facets series.] If you think about it carefully, FIFO is only meaningful when you have a single-threaded sender and a single-threaded receiver; with more than one, who gets to say which message was sent (or received) first? Real-world FIFO semantics.Credit: ?Caravan in the desert.
On Soaking the Rich
The government of BC, the Canadian province where I live, just released a new budget which, among other things, raises tax on high incomes. Here is an overview. The top marginal tax on incomes over C$220,000 goes from 16.8% to 20.5%. This is just provincial tax; what with the Feds, the total top marginal rate is now 53%. Not everyone is delighted. For example Garth Turner, finance/real-estate blogger, who emits a howl of right-wing grief. I?m comfortable speaking about this since I?m personally affected. [These days, a Canuck buck is worth about $0.75 American.] It?s worth noting that our province is led by the New Democratic Party (everyone says ?NDP?)
Sally Leekie
Happy Valentines! A day that celebrates love comes, in my mind, second only to the one that celebrates giving thanks. I didn?t do roses or chocolate, but I made dinner for a couple of people I love; one of the dishes was improvised and came out well, so this recipe is my valentine to the world. The main ingredients are salmon and leeks; thus ?Sally Leekie?. Ingredients Salmon: We use wild frozen-at-sea Pacific Sockeye, usually obtainable in Vancouver. 750g fed three generously. Leeks: A couple of big ones. Garlic: Confession: For this dish, I used minced garlic out of a jar that I bought in a supermarket; a couple of heaping teaspoons-full.
Why Google Did Android
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle?s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky ?ME? subset. My employer was saying nice things about it, and I?d long craved something I could both carry in my pocket and program. I discovered it was pretty easy to program and eventually published the Android Diary series in this space, which got pretty lively readership. Thus, I shouldn?t have been surprised when, shortly after leaving Sun, I got outreach from Google?s Developer Relations org. I was receptive and almost immediately I found myself in Mountain View for the famous Google Interview Day.
Seasonturn
It?s still February, winter obviously, and yet there was a bit of chilly sun today to greet 2020?s crocuses, the photo-introduction of which has become an annual ritual in this space. Here are two shots from January 15th, just twenty-four days ago. The snow was considerable but didn?t last long. The rain?s been extreme even by Vancouver standards, just relentless; we?re all feeling a bit climatically bruised. There could be more snow, but I?m ignoring that. Because of this: These photos shot with the recently-acquired steampunk Pentax M 100/2.8. This year they?re up a little earlier and there are lots!
Bye-bye Time Machine
I recently switched my backup tool from Apple?s Time Machine to Arq Backup which for my needs is clearly better. And once I?d realized that, I wondered whose needs would be best served by Time Machine. To be honest I?m having a hard time with that. Time Machine setup I?d used Time Capsules and Airports for many years and then switched to a Synology DS416j with mirrored 6TB drives. It took a little jiggery-pokery to get the Macs and the Synology talking nicely, but then things seemed to work for a while. But not recently. At regular intervals Time Machine says something like ?Time Machine has enthrophased the gnocchometric continuum, and you need to back up from scratch again.?
Decarbonization
We?re trying to decarbonize our family as much as we can. We?re not kidding ourselves that this will move any global-warming needles. But sharing the story might, a little bit. Those who worry a lot about the climate emergency, and who wonder what they might do about it, are advised to have a look at To fix Climate Change, stop being a techie and start being a human by Paul Johnston (until recently a co-worker). It?s coldly realistic, noting that the Climate Emergency is not your fault and that you can?t fix it. Only radical large-scale global political action will, and his recommendation is that you find an organization promoting such change that meets your fancy (there are lots, Paul provides a helpful list) and join it.
Orange Badge
Late last year one of our admin people walked into my office, saying ?Five-year anniversary, new badge, gimme your old one?. Which means I?ve been here five orbits of the sun, my longest job tenure since my seven-year stay last century at a company I co-founded. Best and worst Best things? The work is fun and the people are nice. Of those working here in Vancouver when I showed on up December 1st, 2014, more than 70% remain, which is impressive in high tech???pretty well any of them can walk down the street to Microsoft or a game company and get a job that week, maybe for more money.
Jag Diary 11: A Year In
The I-Pace insurance renewal showed up so I knew a year must have (so quickly!) gone by. I?d thought I should write something to draw a line under this diary, and then just now the car saved my life, so now?s the time. Not much new information here but maybe a couple of smiles. The insurance???two drivers, good records, no commuting???cost around two and a half thousand Canadian dollars. That year?s other car expenses put together (electricity, replacing a vandalized window) are a tiny fraction of the insurance. Electric cars, even with sports-car performance like the Jag?s, are stupidly cheap to run.
Horopito
It?s a place near the center of New Zealand?s North Island; we spent the last Christmas of the decade there. It?s considered remote in NZ which I guess makes it doubly so in the wider world. Unless you?re planning southern-hemisphere skiing you?re unlikely to go near it, so I felt words and pictures worth sharing. What happened was, Lauren?s brother and his wife who live in Auckland came to visit us and we took them to our cabin; they liked the country-retreat concept so much that they bought an acre in Horopito and built a house on it. This was finished and moved-into on December 18th and in a flash of insane courage, they invited their three children, two children?s spouses, and five grandchildren along.
Content-based Filtering
The publish/subscribe pattern is central to data in motion???event-driven and messaging-based apps, I mean. I?m increasingly convinced that pub/sub software just isn?t complete without some sort of declarative filtering technology, so that you can subscribe to a huge shared torrent of data and only see the parts of it that you need to process. You could look at everything and write code to reject the data you don?t care about, but it?s nice to write a declarative rule and have the system take care of the filtering for you. This piece is about data-filtering technology we?ve been cooking up at AWS, and that I?ve personally put a whole lot of work into.
The Oil Patch Up Against the Wall
I?m terribly worried about how my children???and humans in general???are going to deal with catastrophic global warming in the likely case that the average global temperature spike is somewhere in the 2°-4°C range. I want to highlight a couple of weekend stories on the biggest news story of the twenty-first century: The tragedy of the deniers, and likely consequences for the perpetrators. Like most literate people whose livelihood doesn?t depend directly on the fossil-energy industry, I believe the evidence is overwhelming that anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 overload has a strong greenhouse effect whose results are already visible in receding ice and flurries of ?hundred-year?
@bluesky
At my day job they say ?Think big!?, and @bluesky is that. I can?t stop thinking about it, and bloggers can?t help thinking in public. This work can simultaneously be probably-doomed and obviously-worthwhile. I?m aligned with where Twitter is starting this conversation. First, speaking under my AWS-employee hat: One of our standard soundbites is that people and enterprises should strive to avoid ?undifferentiated heavy lifting?, i.e. wrangling software infrastructure. The basic machinery behind Twitter needs to?keep track of who said what and make it available to others. Let?s go further and grant (as I would) that Twitter exhibits the essential nouns and verbs of text-centric social media: Annotated linking, following, echoing, answering, liking, muting, blocking.
Strongly Typed Events
Back in 2016, in Message Processing Styles, I was sort of gloomy and negative about the notion of automated mapping between messages on the wire and strongly-typed programming data structures. Since we just launched a Schema Registry, and it?s got my fingerprints on it, I guess I must have changed my mind. Eventing lessons I?ve been mixed up in EventBridge, formerly known as CloudWatch Events, since it was scratchings on a whiteboard. It has a huge number of customers, including but not limited to the hundreds of thousands that run Lambda functions, and the volume of events per second flowing through the main buses are keeping a sizeable engineering team busy.
Electric Boats
I love boating, but I hate the fact that powerboats guzzle loads of fossil fuel. I assuage my guilt by noting that the distance traveled is small???a couple of hours for each return trip to the cabin, and there are sadly less than twenty of those per year. Then I got into a discussion on /r/boating about whether electric boats are practical, so herewith some scratchpad calculations on that subject. I?ve ridden on an electric boat, on the Daintree River in Queensland, on a small alligator-watching tour. This thing was flat and had room for maybe fifteen tourists under a canopy, necessary shelter from the brutal tropical sun; on top of the canopy were solar panels, which the pilot told me weren?t quite enough to run the boat up and down the river all day, he had to plug it in at night.
Wolfe and Gika
Chelsea Wolfe I mean, and her opening act Thursday night was Ioanna Gika. It was exceptionally enjoyable, partly because nothing about it was wrong. Lovely music, great staging, good venue, exceptional sound. This happens rarely enough that it?s worth calling out when it does. Chelsea Wolfe Ms Wolfe has appeared on this blog multiple times. She has two modes: Acoustic, where the songs are ethereal splashes of complex slow-moving beauty; and electric, banshee keening nestled into a torrent of roaring guitar drone. Thursday night was sort of acoustic; Chelsea had an acoustic guitar and then a guy on keyboards and guitars.
Bits On the Wire
Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for ?media? (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for ?objects? (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This is a survey of how Object data is encoded for transmission over the Internet. Discussed: JSON, binary formats like Avro and Protobufs, and the trade-offs. Much of what people believe to be true is not. History sidebar The first ever cross-systems data interchange format was ASN.1, still used in some low-level Internet protocols and crypto frameworks.
Subscription Friction
At Canadian Thanksgiving, friends joined us at our cottage for turkey and the fixings. The food (what we made and what they brought) all came out great and we had happy stomachs. I did a lot of the cooking and wanted to check recipes and was brought face to horrified face with the failure of publishing to work on the Internet. The solution seems plain to me and this won?t be the first time I?ve offered it. But something really needs to be done. What happened was, I wanted to refresh my memory on turkey and gravy. These are dishes one makes regularly but rarely and the details don?t stick to my mind: What?s the meat-thermometer reading for a stuffed bird, and what order do you deploy the drippings, roux, and giblet broth in for gravy?
Easy Reliable Chicken Kebabs
This involves a certain amount of chopping stuff up, also attention to hygiene, but requires no particular technical skill and has never ever failed to get rave reviews. Infrastructure and ingredients A barbecue. Charcoal is said to produce better flavor but gas is immensely faster and easier. Skewers. Metal or wood, whatever. Chicken. I?m lazy, I buy it skinless & boneless from the supermarket. Breasts are easier to work with but thighs come out a little better. A kg will satiate four large hungry people. Lemons. You could use the stuff that comes in bottles but that would be lame.
Records and Lenses
Sunday included more fun than the recent average???at my age, chilling is often more attractive than partying. Sunday featured vinyl, vintage lenses, Southern guitar boogie, and a photo-assignment. With pictures! (Which may be a little puzzling, but stay with me.) What happened was, I noticed that there was a Fall 2019 Record Convention and on impulse took the e-bike crosstown to the glamorous (not really) Croation Cultural Centre. I strolled in the door of the big room with all the people and the nice lady said ?You want the record convention or the camera convention? This is the cameras.? Who knew?
Discogs Pain
As I continue slowly ingesting the 900 classical LPs I inherited, I?ve developed a relationship with Discogs. It?s a good place to track your collection (here?s mine, in-progress). This is the story of my first attempt to use it to buy music, a laughable failure. It?s by way of public service, just leaving a marker, a warning others to be careful about charging into the marketplace. There?s a lot to like about Discogs. The screens are unfussy and fast and their coverage of everything ever recorded is just awesome. The LP collection I?m working my way through has plenty of obscurities by no-hit wonders, but I?ve been through a couple hundred records now and only hit one that it didn?t already have: Music from The Golden Age of Silent Movies played by Gaylord Carter at the Mighty Wurlitzer Theater Organ.
At the Climate Strike
I went and so did lots of others, but many couldn?t so I thought I?d try to share the scale and the feel. (Mounted on a hockey stick) I?m pretty old and cynical and still, this felt like it mattered. Even though it was good-humored and consciously funny. Partly it was just the scale???one of our big north-south thoroughfares full of streaming strikers it seemed forever, but they say the peak of the parade only lasted an hour and a half. The police estimated a hundred thousand but they are prone to undercounting based on an institutional fear of too many people in one place going the same direction.
On Sharding
If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there?s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of course, you have to make choices on how you?re going to divide up the traffic among the shards. I?ve had intense exposure to the options since I came to work at AWS. Random spray This is the simplest thing imaginable. For each message, you make a UUID and use it as the Partition Key (if your downstream uses that for sharding), otherwise just pick a target shard using your favorite random number generator.
The Cloud and Open Source
This is eventually about the public cloud and Open Source, but???apologies in advance???takes an indirect and long-ish path. In AWS engineering, we develop stuff and we operate stuff. I think the second is more important. We have good hardware and software engineers, and infrastructure that feels pretty magic to me (faves: the racks and networking gear, the consensus manager underlying QLDB, and the voodoo that makes S3 go). But, like Bill Joy said, ?Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else?, so I?m not gonna kid myself that we?re magically unique at programming. But on the operations side, the picture is really unique.
CL XXXIX: Island Wildlife
Our probably-last Cottage-Life weekend of 2019 featured cetacean encounters and rodent rage. But I didn?t manage to photograph any of that, so just the usual trees and sunsets. Like this: Killers! This morning I was alone at the breakfast table, considering the, sea as one does, when I saw them and was yelling ?whales!? at the family. There were five killer whales, one an adorable juvenile who put a little hop into every surface-to-breathe. They weren?t in a hurry, stayed for a while. ?Orcas? is more common but I say ?killer whales?. Scientists prefer that too, although ?orca? has etymological standing, per Wikipedia.
Portraits of Puppets
If you happened to check out my Twitter feed on the weekend, you?ll know that I attended a pair of dueling rallies outside a train station in central Vancouver. On one side, a crowd in black supporting the Hong Kong protests; on the other a red-clad flag-festooned squad bringing Beijing?s message. I was dressed in black and took pictures of the other side. The issue It?s a no-brainer. Hong Kong isn?t perfect but it?s a civilization, with laws and with access to the world. China is a big hulking cut-off-from-the-world prison for the mind, built on systemic brutality and corruption. I admire the Hong Kongers?
Talking Hong Kong Blues
I?m imagining a discussion that might have taken place in Baidaihe at some point this month at the annual CCP summer offsite. ?Getting ugly in Hong Kong, and I?m not sure our Ms Lam is moving things in the right direction.? ?I hear from the people on the spot that what the good people want is just peace and quiet, this is just a bunch of teenage assholes making trouble.? ?Nobody wants to give their boss bad news. Haven?t you watched the BBC coverage? Maybe you?re hearing good things from your staff, but let?s suppose the gweilo TV is right? What are we going to do??
Jeanneau 795 Review
In Europe this boat is called the Merry Fisher 795 and in the New World, the NC 795. I?ve owned it for a few months and improved it a bit and taken it a few places and feel like sharing. Why review? At this point, regular readers are thinking WTF, boat review?!? I?ve only been on a handful, I?ve only owned one since 2012, I?m still occasionally baffled by nautical jargon, and my command of knots remains imperfect. Here?s why. When you go shopping for a refrigerator or car or coffee-maker or TV or (especially) camera, there are loads of excellent detailed skeptical-voiced reviews you can read before you cough up the money.
Google Pixel Photo Workflow
I recently wrote about the excessive difficulty of moving the Google Pixel phone?s excellent pictures through a Lightroom workflow. It turns out that Lightroom has a solution; herewith details, upsides, downsides, and alternatives. Also, cautionary words for Adobe on Lightroom Classic To start with, Adobe has a page telling you how to Sync Lightroom Classic with Lightroom ecosystem. Sidebar: ?Lightroom Classic? If you?re not sure what ?Lightroom Classic? means, they also have a page whose URL suggests it?s about Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom CC???but the ?CC? designation has apparently been lost, so the cloud-centric version is just Lightroom. For those of us with cameras that aren?t phones and produce huge raw files, Classic is the place to be.
Google Camera RAW vs JPG
I recently wrote about how to move the excellent photos from the Google Pixel phone Camera app into a desktop Lightroom workflow. I was pleased that it?s easy to tell the camera to generate DNG ?RAW? files and include them in the process. But apparently, the camera?s JPGs are better and more useful than the DNGs. That?s weird. Here?s a pair of pictures to illustrate. This morning, the cat found a sunny corner of the back porch and was squirming around out of pure joy. The DNG is above, the JPG below. Of course they?re both JPGs now in the blog, but both are straight out of the camera, resized and JPGized by Lightroom with no sharpening or anything.
Google Photos Breakage
The camera systems in the Google Pixel phones are excellent, but Google makes it way too hard for the serious photographer to get a decent workflow going. Does someone out there know a better way? If not, let?s get together and yell at Google. Pixel. It?s like this: Pictures you take with your Pixel migrate into Google cloud and may be found at photos.google.com. You don?t have to do anything to arrange this, it just happens. There are slideshow and sharing tools and they?re very decent. It?s a great service, I might even pay for it if Google asked. But I???like most serious photographers???want to pull the photos, in their highest-resolution form, into a processing workflow.
EventBridge
The launch of Amazon EventBridge, a somewhat but not entirely new thing, has been well-covered by Jeff Barr; if you want to know what it is, go read Jeff. This piece is to provide a bit of background and context on EventBridge. I didn?t actually make any direct contributions, but was upstream from this work at the definition and early-planning stage. CloudWatch what? My first work at AWS was on the project that launched in January 2016 as CloudWatch Events. To us it felt like a small, simple, service???write rules to route notifications of things happening out there in AWS to Lambdas or other useful destinations.
Wealth Tax Stupidity
Canada?s mainstream conservative biz paper The Financial Post recently published The NDP?s new tax-the-rich plan is terrible, even by their standards and it is stuffed with white-hot stupidity and bad arithmetic. Arguing against any given tax is sane???that?s what conservatives are for, innit????but if they?re going to use math that would get you an ?F? in Grade 8, they deserve a whack with the cluestick. Here?s a Post out-take: The proposal is for an annual one per cent tax on wealth over $20 million. This means that if an Ontario resident to whom this tax applies invests $100,000 in a 1.5 per cent GIC for one year (about the rate currently offered by big banks), he or she will earn a $1,500 nominal return on which will be owed $1,833 in tax ?
Reasons to Cycle
Recently I enthused on the life impact of getting an e-bike. The enthusiasm remains and I two-wheel to work almost every day. Often my thoughts are of the form ?What makes this so great is?? Here are some of those, but there?s a very specific assumption: that your home city has decent bikelane infrastructure. Vancouver?s is not world-class but also not terrible, and I?ll toss in a few pix from my commute for non-bike-commuters who might not have seen what that means. I have 2½ blocks of regular street between homeand the nearest bike route. But it?s pretty nice. It?s free No charge to use the public roads or bikepaths.
CL XXXVIII: Refactorings
What with our jobs and our kids, Cottage Life time has been tough in recent years. But we still believe in the place and the project enough to put money into repairing our dock and replacing our boat. Which raises issues of work-life balance and money laundering. And as always, these pieces are vehicles for pretty pictures of Keats Island and Howe Sound. This is actually from an earlier visit in April. Behind the elegant hydrangea-blossom corpses, Howe Sound and Gambier Island. Logistics What happened was, last winter?s windstorms got nasty, and one of them cost us the aluminum ramp connecting our dock and our float.
Auntie Beth?s Present
My Aunt Beth died a few weeks ago. Her real name was Bertha Marian White (née Scott), here?s her obituary. I was close to her when I was a kid; she was an awfully nice person, and I?m sad. But she?d been fading for years, and in the way of death these days, Beth the person we knew pre-departed the spark of life in her body. One reason we loved her is she always gave the best birthday presents, and she did that again one last time this month. Here?s a 1986 picture of Beth?s and my branches of the family.
Go Creeping In
I?ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between, there are oceans and oceans of Java; to a remarkable degree, it runs the Internet. Except for, here and there, you find a small but steadily increasing proportion of Go. If you want to know what?s going on at Google, go follow Brad Fitzpatrick.
Micromobility
This buzzword has been echoing round the corners of Net conversation, not loud yet but the voices are those that have seemed smart in the past. I joined in a few months back by acquiring a Super Commuter+ 7 e-bike from Trek Bikes. Count me among the converted. I concluded what will probably be the last episode of my Jaguar Diary with ?It makes me happy? but a new car isn?t a life-changer?. Well, I?m here to tell you that an e-bike is. And I suspect this whole Micromobility thing has legs. Two electric vehicles. I?ve biked to work intermittently since I started at AWS in late 2014.
On SQS
In my position I probably shouldn?t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn?t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I?m not an (even partial) parent; so let?s hope that?s OK. I?m talking about Amazon Simple Queue Service, which nobody ever calls by its full name. I?d been thinking I should write on the subject, then saw a Twitter thread from Rick Branson (trust me, don?t follow that link) which begins Queues are bad, but software developers love them. You?d think they would magically fix any overload or failure problem. But they don?t, and bring with them a bunch of their own problems.
Sour Times
Really, they are. Our civic spaces are mis-led and full of anger, some of it even righteous. We have fouled our species? nest and are ignoring the smoke curling out of its edges, and don?t know what?s awaiting when we fall out of the tree. I?ve been sad a lot. For days at a time, even. I get up and find myself barking at my children for the smallest sins; just a shitty mood that I can?t shake. Introspecting, I see that I enjoy my job and get along with my family and am loved enough and have enough others to love.
Sungarden
End of April, beginning of May, it?s pretty well peak time for flowers. Back in the last millennium, I used to run lots of flower pictures here, but they started blurring together in my mind in a way that made me not want to. But sometimes when the sun?s in just the right place, the flowers insist. These trilliums are at our cabin on Keats Island. They?ve usually bloomed and gone by the first time in spring we get over. Almost painfully pure, to my eye. A few houses down the street from us, this tulip, not content behind the white pickets, strains sunward.
Jag Diary 10: Four Months In
Yesterday I drove the I-Pace to Seattle and back in one day, 459.8km (285.7 miles); the second time I?ve done that. What with that, and coming up for four months ownership, I thought it was time for another, maybe the final, instalment in this diary. Mostly good news???by a wide margin the best car I?ve ever driven let alone owned???but nothing?s perfect. Range That?s still the biggest talking point about electric cars. But up here in the Pacific Northwest anyhow, the charging network is pretty well good enough and getting better. If I?m staying overnight in Seattle I use the Level 2 chargers in the Amazon buildings.
2019 Networking Snapshot
Home networking, I mean, and by phone. Hasn?t been on my mind much, because it?s generally been good enough. But for a variety of reasons I got an Eero WiFi setup and so now I have to think about it. What happened was, our ISP sent us a note saying ?We upped your data from 150Mbps to 300.? Our home infrastructure features Cat5 installed in the last century and an old Apple Time Capsule, none of us remember when we got it. Also, we?d like the new Jaguar to get enough WiFi out in the carport to do downloads. Wirecutter and a couple of other sites liked the Eero (I was a little surprised that the Google offering isn?t terribly competitive).
Tianjin
It?s a chunk of China west and south of Beijing, extending to the sea, with a mere fifteen or so million or so people. It was where our walking-the-Wall sequence ended up, specifically at ??? (Huangyaguan). The wall there was OK, but there was an attached museum I really liked, and also the Eastern Qing Tombs, which are highly photogenic and full of stories. Here?s a view out over Huangyaguan from up on the Wall. [This is part of The Surface of China series.] If you make it to Huangyaguan, don?t spend your whole time up on the wall, leave an hour or two for the Huangyaguan Great Wall Museum, which seems not to have a Web presence.
Walking the Great Wall
That was the name of the tour and that?s what we did, on each of five successive days. It was exhausting and thrilling and educational and yielded more good pictures than good stories. So herewith an illustrated narrative of what you might expect to do and see if you take this sort of tour. [This is part of The Surface of China series.] Tour stuff Our party comprised 14 and our tour-guide Lijuan, of whom more later. We piled into a little minibus with our backpacks in the first couple of rows and headed north out of Beijing. The party included four Canadian tech geeks and their two 12-year-old daughters and a wine merchant from Sydney; The rest were from the south of England.
On Liking Beijing
It?s complicated. No big city offers just one flavor. Beijing (only China?s third biggest) has plenty. I feel no need to go back (see Disliking Beijing) but I liked some. [This is part of The Surface of China series.] Dancing! Our headquarters was the Laurel Hotel; the district seemed to be called Jiaomen, and it was? nothing special. But it had street life, notably including dancing. There were three separate dance scenes within a couple of blocks. We?re talking about a ghetto-blaster on a stand on the plaza in front of a mall or apartment building, maybe a dance leader, and then a gaggle of couples with wildly varying skill, dancing apparently for pure pleasure.
On Disliking Beijing
Walking the Great Wall was fun, but Beijing is more intense, leaving me with strong and mixed feelings. There?s a lot to dislike, and on balance I can?t imagine wanting to live there. (But see also On Liking Beijing.) To start with, it?s flat and sprawling, built for cars not people, and the pollution is bad. We arrived on a nice sunny Monday and the air was pretty clear. But by week?s end it was gruesome. [This is part of The Surface of China series.] Bad air day. As they say in Green and Urbanist communities, if you build a city for cars, you?ll get cars.
Fujifilm X-T30
I bought the latest Fuji in Hong Kong. Herewith the how and why, and twenty-four Chinese-flavored photos as supporting evidence. Um, if you?re visiting on a less-than-fast Internet link, you might have to wait a bit for ?em. Sorry ?bout that. Hong Kong cliche #1. 35mm, 1/680, f/4, ISO 320.Some of these 25-story apartment buildings are walkups,and the flats still go for a cool million. Hong Kong cliche #2. 18-55mm@18, 1/340, f/7.1, ISO 320. Hong Kong Cliche #3. [email protected], 1/220, f/3.6, ISO 1250. These guys yelled at me to stop shooting, but with a camera small and fast enough you can get a couple before they notice.
2,700 km
That?s the distance from Hong Kong to Beijing, and if you?re on a train that cruises at 306km/h, you can leave at 8:05AM and arrive one minute past five in the afternoon. The train has a number and a Wikipedia entry: G80 (check it out for some cool pix of the train). I suspect that not that many readers have taken this, so herewith words and pictures. Hong Kong West Kowloon station is bright and new and huge. It?s faster than an airport but there are really a lot of stages to get through: HK exit, HK customs, security, PRC health, PRC customs, PRC immigration.
Visiting Buddha
Its official name is Tian Tan Buddha but everyone in Hong Kong just says ?Big Buddha? and indeed it?s maybe the biggest tourist attraction. That?s OK, it?s worth visiting and you probably should if you?re there. I offer no insights about Asian religions but some possibly-useful tourist advice and a couple of pictures that make me smile. You can get a ferry from Pier 6 on Central over to Mui Wo on Lantau Island, where the Buddha is, along with both Buddhist and Christian monasteries, the new airport, Disneyland, and some damn nice hiking trails; I spent a pleasurable few hours on those a couple of decades ago.
The Surface of China
What happened was, the girls are finishing Grade Seven so we walked the Great Wall of China. This actually makes perfect sense. By ?the girls? I mean my daughter and a schoolfriend; they?ve been in Mandarin Bilingual elementary and have learned quite a bit of Chinese. They may be at their maximum proficiency for a while, since their high schools? Mandarin offerings aren?t that great. So we (I mean the girls? parents) thought we should expose them to some Real Chinese. Except for none of the adults speak any, so we went shopping for tours and picked Walk the Great Wall of China.
Fun With Semiotics
I just finished reading The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet; it?s impossibly erudite and also hilarious. If you remember the Eighties and if have some idea why Foucault, Giscard, Nastase, and Eco were interesting, you might really enjoy it, especially if you?re also entertained by sex, violence, and conspiracy theory. I was in the library looking at travel guides for an upcoming vacation, and as I was coming down the escalator the book?s garish cover grabbed my attention sufficiently that I had to go look at it, and then took it home. There?s a story in here about signs and signals and that sort of stuff.
Pink Floyd Dad Jokes
I took my 12-year-old and 19-year-old to see Nick Mason?s Saucerful of Secrets tour (Lauren had choir practice). The band was grizzled, grey, and genial; when Nick closed by saying ?We hope you had as much fun as we did? we felt he meant it. Their stage banter was that of well-bred Englishmen, dry and mild. Nick?s opening remarks: Hi there. This isn?t The Australian Roger Waters or The Danish Dave Gilmours. For context: Nick Mason is the only drummer Pink Floyd ever had. The concept is that, since the various Floyd incarnations mostly perform numbers starting with Dark Side of the Moon but there was a lot of good pre-Dark Side Floyd, that?s what Nick and the boys are playing.
Graying Out
For many years I?ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they?re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized. Since forever I?ve used a chat client called Adium; it?s open-source, has a good, polished, flexible UX, and is self-updating. The people I talked to, some of them were on AIM, ICQ, on various flavors of Jabber and XMPP and then, in latter years, Google+. What?s happening is, they?re going away. The chat connections I mean, although many of those underlying services are winking out too, one by one.
2019?s Crocuses
They come early, purple and gold harbingers of spring. Traditionally I have celebrated them in this blog space. But that nearly didn?t happen this year, for reasons that are obvious in the picture. They?d just come up when we got snow, which then in mid-February kicked off an extended cold snap, many nights hitting -5°C or below, and the daytime highs rarely topping +5°. So those little guys are survivors. They?ve lived under snow, with more shoveled on top (they grow by the sidewalk), and they?re still here. I had to pick and choose my photos because lots are kinda beat-up looking.
LP Log
What happened was, Lauren said ?My friend Leonard from choir has a friend whose husband died, and she?s wondering what to do with his record collection.? I said ?If she doesn?t want to try to sell them, I?ll have a look at them.? Then I took off on a business trip. When I got back, Lauren said ?You need to bring the records in from the van.? There turned out to be 900. This is the start of a story of musical discovery. They turn out to be almost all classical, where the exceptions are cheesy-looking pre-Rock pop music. I think this piece will anchor an ?LP Log?
Tech Office Sketches
Herewith notes from the white-hot center of the Internet software profession. Maybe the reality these reflect prevails across other technology territories, but I wouldn?t know. In no particular order: Videoconferencing Generally it sucks. There?s Skype ?n? TeamViewer ?n? Zoom ?n? Webex ?n? our own Chime ?n? GoToMeeting ?n? join.me and they all suck in their own unlovable idiosyncratic ways. The visual glitches I can tolerate, but the audio problems make me want to scream; dropouts, static, echoes, the noise of hands softly leafing through a document drowning out any non-booming voice. In my decades-long career, I?ve used one videoconferencing system that was reliable and almost always Just Worked.
D&I Soundbites
I went to a two-day ?D&I workshop for leaders?. Many in biz will know what that stands for: Diversity and Inclusion. The people facilitating were WMFDP, which stands for ?White Men as Full Diversity Partners?. Having said that, only one of the two was a white man, and the audience was more gender-diverse than the high-tech norm. Everyone was senior, there were lots of VPs in the room. It had a strong effect on me. Truths In the technology space, we suck at diversity. We?re broadly better than average at LGBTQ, probably not far off the mainstream at Under-Represented Minorities, and terrible at gender.
Jag Diary 9: Google Mapocalypse
2019 is definitely the year of Linux on? the dashboard. This Jaguar is the first car I?ve owned with a serious infotainment system, and it?s opened my eyes to a few things, one of which might be a real Google vulnerability: serious competition in the map space. That?s the main story here, but I?ll tack on a few random observations about the infotainment system for the Jaguar-obsessed that have been reading this series. About those maps? At breakfast on my recent road trip, I got some crud in the socket on my Pixel 2 so Android Auto wouldn?t connect, and I was looking for a place in Seattle I?d never been.
Jag Diary 8: Road Trip!
Today I drove the new I-Pace 290.3 mostly highway kilometers. In the best online I-Pace community, the top topic, with 1,115 posts as I write, is I-Pace range. Because when you come to electric cars, range anxiety is a thing. Today?s road-trip report will cover the general highway experience but, since it?s the hot topic, will zero in on range. Spoiler: You can almost always go 300km without trying too hard. Here?s the trip. It was a three-leg trip, from Seattle?s downtown to one of its western neighborhoods, then to SeaTac airport, then home to Vancouver; only the last (longest) leg is illustrated.
Jag Diary 7: I-Pace Over 100
That?s over a hundred kilometers of course, which it took three days to achieve. I?m immensely enjoying learning how to deploy that electric-Jag power gracefully. Yeah, you can floor it, which is shocking if brutish fun and might damage your neck vertebrae. But you know what?s way sweeter? Coming out of a corner, or around a slower car, and easing the accelerator down, and then further and further down, smoothly. You can?t do this for more than a few seconds without being in seriously unlawful territory anywhere this side of the Autobahn, but oh my goodness those are really very pleasing seconds; the pool of acceleration is bottomless.
Jag Diary 6: I-Pace Day Two
No highways were harmed in the preparing of this blog fragment; our new I-Pace is for the moment an urban runabout. In town, it doesn?t get you anywhere faster than a Honda Fit or 20-year old Ford Focus would. But those burn fossil fuels and we should all try to stop doing that. [Yes, I said I was going to do live updates to Sunday?s Green Light piece, but that turns out to be annoying. Sorry.] The door handles are flush when parked, but slide out when you unlock. When you unlock at night they glow and project, absurdly albeit with decent kerning, on the adjacent pavement.
Jag Diary 5: The Green Light
I picked up the new family wheels, a 2019 Jaguar I-Pace, on January 12th. Current plans are for this blog fragment to get updates for the next couple of weeks, through a planned road trip, per the ?diary? part of the series title. The wait I?d reserved a spot in March and ordered the car in July, so it?s been a wait, and I?ve been in a sort of Gatsby-and-the-green-light mode. It?s not as simple as expectations being high, although the car?s won loads of awards; the early shipments have not been problem-free, and the car has picked up a legion of haters???chiefly $TSLA longs, but still.
Oil Fail
Today I learned things that I think every environmentalist and investment manager should know: A coherent argument that we are more or less at Peak Oil. Not the Nineties version, which worried that we might be running out of fossil fuels, but rather that global human petroleum demand is about at its all-time peak and about to start drifting down. Some of the key data points involve electric cars, which I care a lot about, and China, which is always interesting. The effects are likely not enough to avert the oncoming global-warming disaster, but there are grounds for optimism about reducing its devastation.
SF-5: Serverless Bills?
One of the best reasons to go serverless is that you might save a lot of money. This is especially true when your load is peaky and has quiet times; because when your infrastructure isn?t working, you?re not paying. But, not all loads are peaky. And here?s a quote from an AWS internal mailing list: ?For every compute load, there?s some level of TPS where Lambda is going to be more expensive than servers.? So, when is that? And how much should you care? [This is part of the Serverlessness series.] Saving money with servers The answer, of course, like always, is ?it depends?.
Christian Practice
I?m in Regina, Saskatchewan with family for the holidays. On impulse I said ?Let?s go to a Christmas Eve carol service? and five of us did that. We went to Lakeview United, where ?United? signifies the United Church of Canada, the biggest Protestant denomination up here. It was uplifting and pleasant and sort of sad. Disclosure: I?m not Christian at all; but still. As you can see, the congregation (for the 8PM December 24th service) was sparse and elderly. The statistics are remorseless: Christianity is in decline. The proportion of Canadians who attend church weekly is not far from 10%. This surprises me, if only because the Church?s tools are still very strong.
SF-4: Serverless Latency?
Suppose we like the idea of going serverless (we do). What should we worry about when we make that bet? What I hear when I talk to people thinking about it, mostly, is latency. Can a run-on-demand function respond as quickly as a warmed-up Web server sitting there in memory waiting for incoming work? The answer, unsurprisingly, is ?it depends?. [This is part of the Serverlessness series.] What we talk about when we talk about latency First of all, in this context, latency conversations are almost all about compute latency; in the AWS context, that means Lambda functions and Fargate containers.
SF-3: Serverless Everything?
Sometimes we fans get a little over-excited and declaim that everything should be serverless. After all, we?re pretty convinced that owning data centers and computers is becoming a thing of the past. Well then, how could configuring your own hosts and paying for them even when they?re not working ever be a good idea? Let?s try to be moderate and pragmatic: Serverless, where possible. [This is part of the Serverlessness series.] But what does ?Where possible? mean? Here?s a nice concrete example from inside AWS: the Amazon MQ service, which is a managed version of the excellent Apache ActiveMQ open-source message broker.
SF-2: Why Serverless?
Well obviously: Frugality, security, and elasticity. But I want more, I want better software. [This is part of the Serverlessness series.] Frugality The core idea is that when your workload goes to zero, so does your bill. You might save big; Financial Engines is the first case study that Google popped up for me, but I?ve heard muttered stories in the hallways about way bigger savings than that. And then there?s my co-worker who took his school-photographer wife?s Website billings from $10/month down to a few cents. And we?re not just talking about Lambda. When there are no messages flowing through your SQS queue, you?re not paying anything.
SF-1: What Is Serverless?
I don?t think it?s that complicated: If you can?t see the servers in the service, then it?s serverless. Yeah, they?re still there, but the whole point is that you can mostly not worry about them. [This is part of the Serverlessness series.] That doesn?t work just for functions: Lots of services, for example RDS (in certain flavors), ElasticSearch, and Amazon MQ, require that you pick an instance that the service runs on before you start. Let?s extend the nomenclature a bit; if anything requires that you pre-provision IOPS (or other unit of capacity), then that?s not so serverless. It?s a great service, but it?s not serverless.
Serverlessness
I work in AWS?s Serverless group, and in the process of pulling together my presentation at re:Invent, discovered that I have a lot of opinions on the subject and, while they may well be wrong, are at least well-informed. You can watch that YouTube, but who?s got an hour to spare? And anyhow, blogging?s really my favorite medium, so here we go. If I tried to glom them all together into one mega-essay it?d be brutally long, so let?s go short-form. The Serverless Fragments ?Serverless Fragment? has five syllables and ongoing doesn?t have that much room at the top of the page for the title, so let?s say ?SF?.
Step Functions Integration
On Thursday we launched some add-ons for AWS Step Functions, on which I helped a bit. As usual, there?s a nice Jeff Barr blog. This is to add design notes and extra color. Our announcement describes these as ?Integrations????internally, while we were building them, we called them Connectors, and I?m going to stick with that because it has one less syllable and feels idiomatic. Tl;dr Up till now, Step Functions knew how to hand work to Lambda functions and to polling ?Activity Workers?. As of now, it can also make use of DynamoDB (read/write), Batch (start a job in either fire-and-forget or wait-for completion mode), ECS (regular and Fargate flavors), SNS (write-only), SQS (write-only), Glue (like Batch, async or sync), and SageMaker (same).
Post-REST
More or less all the big APIs are RESTful these days. Yeah, you can quibble about what ?REST? means (and I will, a bit) but the assertion is broadly true. Is it going to stay that way forever? Seems unlikely. So, what?s next? What we talk about when we talk about ?REST? These days, it?s used colloquially to mean any API that is HTTP-based. In fact, the vast majority of them offer CRUD operations on things that have URIs, embed some of those URIs in their payloads, and thus are arguably RESTful in the original sense; although these days I?m hearing the occasional ?CRUDL?
Car Capitalism
What happened was, I was hurtling around a mall parking lot in a beautiful British-designed hundred-thousand-dollar sports car, and I thought ?Is this the good side of capitalism?? I ? Cars Disclosure: I like driving sufficiently well to have written, ten years ago, an encomium on the subject that includes a police takedown and a poem. And there are lots of things to like about the business. It produces products across a huge ranges of prices that work pretty well???better every year, in fact???and last a long time, and about which people have strong aesthetic feelings. There?s no suggestion of monopoly; competition is fierce and it?s possible for new companies to grab a foothold.
Car-Charge Economics
The Wikipedia article on Electric Car Use by Country is interesting. Below I excerpt a graph (misspellings: theirs) of the leading electric-car jurisdictions: As I write, Norway leads, at over 20%, while the US average is 1.5%. (Visit the Wikipedia link for the latest whenever you read this.) How are all these cars going to be fed? Let?s consider the future business of car-charging. My own angle Since I?m about to become an electric-car owner, I?ve been pre-planning trips, both for work (i.e. to Seattle) and to visit family elsewhere in Western Canada. And I?m having a feeling I last had in the Nineties, as a bleeding-edge traveling Internet user.
Jag Diary 4: Marketing Tour
What happened was, Lauren and I played hookey from work and took in Jaguar/Land Rover?s Art of Performance tour, and it was a total blast, a couple hours of pure fun. This is just a recommendation for the show plus a few things I?ve learned about the car (which remains super interesting) since the last Jag-Diary entry. The Tour If it?s coming anywhere near you, I recommend signing up and going; near as I can tell, the only requirement is that you have a driver?s license. It was in a big boring suburban mall parking lot. They started with good coffee and hors d?oeuvres in a tent, and a bunch of pretty Jags and Range Rovers outside in the parking lot, all unlocked so you could get in and fool around.
Retiring?
I?m not young and I can afford to stop working. I?m wondering if I should. Reasons to retire Some mornings, I feel like sleeping in. And then, when I get up, I?d like to spend two or three hours on Feedly and The Economist, just reading what?s going on in the world. I?d like to spend more summer time at my cabin. When I?m engaged in work I bring a whole lot of intensity; not significantly less than a few decades ago, I think. But at the end of the day, man, I?m so tired. Some days I can hardly scare up evening conversation with the family.
On Weed
Last Thursday, cannabis became legal in Canada. For example, here?s my local provincial government?s online cannabis store (screenshot below). There are going to be physical storefronts too, some private-sector, but the licensing process is slow so there aren?t any in Vancouver yet, except of course for the dozens of ?dispensaries? that have been up and running for years; I suppose some of them will become legal. Which is to say, it hasn?t been very dramatic. But I think it is sort of a big deal. It?s a big deal because it?s an example of democracy actually working. We had a legal framework whose goals???stamp out pot???were not only unachievable but unsupported by evidence.
On Cash
What happened was, I was walking through a train station on the way to work with the buds playing randomly on shuffle and a knifeblade of Real Music came in from outside so I had to pull them out of my ears, there was this young dude getting great electric sound out of a teeny amp doing a slow take on Little Wing with a really good voice: When I?m sad, she comes to me? plenty room between the notes and lots of soul in them. He looked a little hard-pressed; I put my hand in my pocket for some coin but there was no coin there because I live on plastic these days and that busker went unpaid that morning.
The Green Man?s Heir
I just read this 2018 book by Juliet McKenna, which I discovered in Reading August/September, a blog post by Nicola Griffith, author of the excellent Hild (which I highly recommend here). I really enjoyed it and I bet a lot of you would too. Green Man doesn?t aim too high???a straightforward story of a fellow whose mother is a Dryad (tree spirit) living in the middle of England in the present day. His heritage means he can see, and interact with, woodland creatures out of myth (naiads, boggarts, and of course the Green Man); also that he is large, muscular, and has unusual (hetero-)sexual magnetism.
JSON Event Scheming
I?m pretty sure that event-driven software is already a big deal and is going to get bigger. Events, de facto, are JSON blobs, and in general we?d like to make them easier to consume in computer programs. I?ve written before about how it?s difficult to specify JSON dialects, and also about Schemaless message processing. It turns out there?s good news from the world of JSON Schema, but the problem is far from solved. ?Event-driven?? It?s not exactly a new idea; I first heard it back when I used to program GUIs where of course everything is an event, and your code is all about handling them in callbacks.
Oh, Shenandoah!
What happened was, back when I was doing Songs of the Day, I wrote up that great old American tune Oh Shenandoah, and idly wondered who Shenandoah was; the Wikipedia entry said he was a real person, an Oneida of the seventeen-hundreds. Then I thought of that lyric Oh Shenandoah, I loved your daughter, and wondered who she was and who might have loved her, and found myself going down a rabbit hole. I have now read several books on the subject, uncovered a hell of a story, an idea for a billion-dollar play or movie, and met some really interesting dead people.
Unbrittle Events
At AWS, I?m now in the Serverless organization, which in 2018 is big fun. Someone asked me to check out the work being done at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), particularly around CloudEvents. There?s been a particularly interesting argument going on around there that I think has useful lessons for anyone who cares about designing network protocols. I?m naturally interested in Eventing because it?s central, not just to serverless computing, but to modern application construction in general. Events are a good way to think about a lot of different things: Actual events from the real world (?Garage door opened?) , infrastructure happenings (?database failed over?)
Diversity ?Goals?
Many of us (speaking from the tech sector where I work) think the sector?s workplace diversity isn?t very good. Specifically, there aren?t enough women. Large companies???all the ones I?ve worked for, anyhow???have goals, and generally work hard at meeting them. Many companies now say they care about diversity, and have goals around improving it. But improvement is painfully slow; why? Maybe part of it is that those aren?t the same kind of ?goals?. How business goals work When I say ?large companies have goals?, I mean that in a very specific way. Each planning cycle, company groups and their managers take on a set of explicitly written-down goals for that planning cycle.
Bye-bye Haida Gwaii
I?m down to my last few pictures and stories from our July vacation in Haida Gwaii and Gwaii Haanas. Fuji X-T2, XF55-200mmF3.5-4.8, 200mm, 1/680 sec at f/5.6, ISO 200 Most of our stops were at old Haida village sites. One of the highlights, aside from the totem poles, were the sites of the large houses; here?s a sample: Pixel 2, 1/350 sec at f/1.8, ISO 50 The idea was, they dug down into the earth, then they put up a fair-size house on top. The steps down to the floor would provide living and sleeping space; the fire would be in the middle.
Why Serverless?
We were arguing at work about different modes of computing, and it dawned on me that the big arguments for going serverless are business arguments, not really technology-centric at all. Maybe everyone else already noticed. [Disclosure: Not only do I work at AWS, but as of earlier this year I?m actually part of the Serverless group. I still spend most of my time working on messaging and eventing and workflows, but that?s serverless too.] Now, here are a few compelling (to me, anyhow) arguments for serverless computing: Capacity Planning. It?s hard. It?s easy to get wrong. The penalties for being wrong on the high side are wasted investment, and on the low side abused customers.
Ninstints and Koyah
On the second day of our Haida Gwaii excursion, our long morning Zodiac stage started just outside the park (the green zone on this map), headed through interior channels and then out into the Hecate Strait around the bottom right of Moresby Island, where we saw the seals and whales pictured previously here, then turning west along the bottom of Moresby through the Houston Stewart Channel and ending up at the place you can see marked ?Ninstints? near the bottom center of the map. It has several other names but to the locals it?s SG?ang Gwaay Llanagaay; they drop the third word so it sounds like Sgangway.
Photographing Haida Gwaii
The photographic landscape is shifting under us. I took four lenses to Haida Gwaii, assuming you count the Pixel 2 as one of them, and you should; that?s the landscape shift. The ?real? lenses: Fujifilm 35mm F1.4, my favorite lens I?ve ever owned. Also one of Fuji?s cheapest; goes to show something or other. Fufifilm 55-200mm F3.5-4.8. Super-useful zoom range, could be faster, but then it?d be heavier. Samyang 135mm F/2.0, which I?ve blogged about a lot here; a difficult, beautiful, opinionated tool. Let?s start with a case study; some old weathered Haida totems on the beach at SG?ang Gwaay, an astonishing place that deserves its own write-up.
How To Visit Haida Gwaii
It looks remote on the map and it is, but it?s not that hard to get to. The big reason to go is Gwaii Haanas, the huge southern Canada/Haida-Nation park. It is really hard to get to and, since it?s a large expanse of rocky islands, hard to get around in. But you can do it. The rest of Haida Gwaii I mean, outside the park. It?s beautiful and has roads and bridges and ferries so you can drive around and see it. We only allowed a single day and that was a mistake; you need two. We spent it driving from Sandspit, where the flights from Vancouver land and the tours to Gwai Haanas jump off, taking the ferry from Moresby to Graham islands, north through Skidegate and Tlell and Masset to Tow Hill, a huge chunk of volcanic rock with a nice boardwalk to the top.
T'aanuu llnagaay
On Friday July 13th I was sitting under trees looking at the ocean and I thought ?This is maybe the nicest place I?ve ever been.? The beach was at Tanu (T'aanuu llnagaay in the Haida language), which is here. In front of me, the Hecate Strait, much hated by West Coast mariners. Behind me, the old Haida village site, with interesting memento mori: a mass grave of fifty or so smallpox victims, and the beautiful modern gravestone of Bill Reid. Flowing over me, a breeze of what struck me as the freshest, cleanest, nicest air I have ever breathed. This was on the last day of our Haida Gwaii, uh, let me see, I can hardly call it an adventure after all that.
Jag Diary 3: What We Know
Between June 4th, when the first wave of reviews of the New Jag hit (offically the I-PACE, what a dumb name) and the time the salesman called me saying ?time to sign the order if you want to be in the first wave?, I had to decide whether to spend a lot of money on a car I?d never seen in the flesh. So I paid damn close attention to those reviews. I?m a critical reader, and suspicious about the motives of product reviewers, and I think the picture that emerges is pretty clear. This post is to enumerate what I think it?s possible to know for sure about the car without having owned or even driven one.
Jag Diary 2: ?T-K?
Apparently Jaguar committed to developing a serious electric car back in 2014, which was a brave move at that point. Obviously, this wouldn?t have happened, nor would the upcoming Audi, Porsche, and Mercedes BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles), if Tesla hadn?t proved that these things can be built and people want to buy them. Now, suppose you had the job of marketing this new thing to the world; how would you start? Launching The I-PACE (Reminder: Dumb name, hereinafter referred to as ?the Jag?) launched in early March 2018 at the Geneva Motor Show. They set up a sort of little go-kart track in a parking lot outside the show, with cones you had to drive around, whose tips illuminated in an unpredictable pattern.
Jaguar Diary
On Wednesday, I signed an order for a 2019 Jaguar I-PACE, to be delivered in the late autumn. For those who don?t follow the electric-car scene, this is a brand-new no-petroleum product with range and performance in the same range as a Tesla S or X. Since electric cars interest geeks and greens???both over-represented in my readership???and since the Jag is a new thing and contains a lot of technology, I thought I?d do a diary-and-notes series on the car and the experience of getting into the electric-driving space. The configuration I ordered. The picture is kind of fuzzybecause it?s a screen grab from Jaguar?s VR configurator.
SotD: What a Wonderful World
That?s all, folks. Welcome to the last Song of the Day. I knew pretty early what I wanted it to be, because every extended endeavor should endeavor to end on a high note. And What a Wonderful World fits, albeit indirectly, into the exit theme, worship and reverence. It is of course, a wonderful world, from my point of view. After all, I?m its apex predator, the product of an evolutionary process that?s extended over most of our fair planet?s lifetime. In effect, I?m specifically the organism that is most well-suited to this particular world. Put another way, this world made us, and we should show reverence towards our Creator.
SotD: It?ll Shine When It Shines
At the end of the day, the pursuit of the divine is supposed to offer up wisdom and, practically speaking, teach you how to live life better. But for me, the sacred scriptures are songs; not that I listen to them looking for life lessons, but sometimes they?re there anyway. It?ll Shine When It Shines is by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and it?s up-front about its message; one that I feel good about passing along. Let?s hand the mike over the Daredevils for a moment: Seems like everyone is out looking for the sun singing rain and pain on he who hesitates.
SotD: The Return
I introduced Ferron to the Song of the Day a couple weeks back with Bellybowl, and I?d like to use her beautiful The Return in this closing focused-on-the-divine sequence, to help talk about my own experience of worship. But first, the song. The melody sways back and forth like the willow tree in the words, and the voice ambles through those words, pausing in unlikely places as the tree bends. And those lyrics: They mostly don?t parse into coherent sentences but Ferron knows what she?s doing and there?s no doubt where she?s aiming. Also, the harmonies are gorgeous and the arrangement is approximately perfect.
SotD: Graceland
In case it wasn?t obvious from yesterday?s piece, Graceland???the real one I mean, Elvis? mansion in Memphis???is a place of worship. The visitors are serene, experiencing belief not faith; a lot of them saw Elvis on TV or even in the flesh. They know that, as Paul Simon sings, in his lovely, lovely song also called Graceland, that there?s reason to believe that they?ll all be received there. And also just the name ?Graceland? is the prettiest word imaginable. ?Poor boys and pilgrims? Paul sings, but getting into the mansion is kind of expensive so I guess it?s just pilgrims.
SotD: So High
More music on the subject of God (and Heaven too); a traditional spiritual arranged by Elvis Presley for his 1967 Gospel album How Great Thou Art, which was a triple-platinum hit and won the 1967 Grammy for Best Sacred Performance. So High is a fine, rousing tune with a good arrangement, and just terrific singing. Elvis never won a Grammy for pop music, but more than one for Gospel. I have a story to tell, possibly relevant. In about 1990, I had a business trip to Nashville, so I took my then-wife along and we did Tennessee: the Opry, Jack Daniels, Beale Street, Sun Studios, and of course Graceland (visit that Web site).
SotD: O vis aeternitatis
Ladies, gentlemen, and others, welcome to the 2018 Song of the Day closing sequence. This has been a lot of work and I thought I should try to end it with more than just a set of random tunes, so I picked a theme: Worship, the sacred, and the divine. To start, from Hildegard von Bingen, the oldest song to appear, first sung sometime in the years around 1150: O vis aeternitatis means ?The Power of Eternity?. Hildegard was a remarkable person; reading her Wikipedia entry makes me want to find out more. Normally, upon discovering an interesting ancient I?d go looking for their own writings in translation.
SotD: Live at Leeds
I love rock music, and I love live albums, and this might be the best live rock&roll recording ever. I?m not claiming the whole album?s a Song of the Day (and anyhow, there?s been a baffling parade of re-issues and remasters and so on). But I am going to double up and recommend two songs: I Can?t Explain and the My Generation Medley. The first because it?s a pure pop gem, the second, even though it?s way long, because inhabits the joyful heart of the music I love. Live At Leeds was recorded on Valentine?s Day in 1970; it?s messy, chaotic, and full of brilliant moments.
SotD: Subcode
By appearing twice in this series Jah Wobble joins luminaries like Miles Davis and J.S. Bach. Im not going to claim that he looms as large on the musical landscape; just that he writes and plays nice tunes featuring divinely great bass lines. And, well, I just cant say no to that. Subcode is a slithery, icy-cool river of funk. This is off Radioaxiom: A Dub Transmission which pairs Mr Wobble with Bill Laswell, famous American bassist/producer/impresario. Two basses are better than one! But it leads to a practical problem. If you want to hear this the way its meant to sound, your subwoofer has to emulate an Imperial Battle Cruiser exploding a medium-sized planet.
SotD: One More Cup of Coffee
This is my favorite Bob Dylan song, by a mile. Maybe its Scarlet Riveras violin that grabs me. Maybe its Emmylou Harris harmonies. Maybe its the fearsome chord hook when he sings To the valley below . Its just great. In fact, Ive liked it so long that I wrote a whole blog piece on it twelve years ago. In the unlikely event you want words by Bray on Dylan, there are plenty there. Lets skip ahead straight to the links. This is part of the Song of the Day series (background). Links Spotify playlist. This tune on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify.
SotD: Im Not Afraid
If this series brings one or two of you one or two really hot rock-n-roll tunes you never know existed, then I can go home happy. Maybe this is one: Im Not Afraid is by Fleming and John, a husband-and-wife tune who have never been big stars or anything like that, but should go down in history for this song. Its fast, its electric, its melodic, and the words run through your head in a fun way. Also, its an important question: What are you afraid of, and not afraid of? The answer, in this case, is heart-warming, but youll have to listen to the tune to hear it.
SotD: Steady As She Goes
This is off Broken Boy Soldiers by the The Raconteurs, better known as Back when Jack White did a couple of records with Brendan Benson. Steady, As She Goes (why that comma?) was the big single on that record, co-written by White & Benson, and is just an outstanding pop tune, although Jack has his own ideas about where to take it. I took this myself, in 2008. The Raconteurs were maybe my favorite of the Jack White vehicles over the years, mostly because Benson didnt seem intimidated, clearly saw himself as co-frontman, able to play a guitar break or sing lead on a chorus when he felt like.
SotD: Bellybowl
At one point in my life, I found myself married to a lesbian. Its a long story, not terribly happy. This arrangement had important disadvantages, but a pretty big upside: I discovered womens music. Its not actually a genre, its just that the performers are mostly lesbian and the audiences are mostly, women (although men were perfectly welcome; I have yet to encounter any class of musician who objected to any class of person enjoying their music, and (especially) paying for it. If youre wondering what kind of music Im talking about, listen to Bellybowl by Ferron, and youll know; mostly, excellent.
SotD: Crazy Fingers
Im sad that I never saw the Grateful Dead live; theyve left marks on the collective musical consciousness that will be there as long as such a thing exists. But Blues For Allah is my favorite of their studio recordings, and Crazy Fingers by a wide margin the best song there. Thats a photo of my own personal copy of the record. Man, thats some really old cardboard and vinyl. Now, Im prejudiced, Crazy Fingers provided background for one or two very special moments in my youth, not the kind of thing I can share, but theres a warm glow and a smile inside every time I hear that tune.
SotD: High
High by Sir Sly (cool name) will be the last 2018 Song Of The Day in the current-hit category. The usual thing: I heard it on the car radio and it sounded good and then kept sounding good even on heavy rotation. While theres a serious problem with this work, its still a masterful piece of songwriting. Did I say there was a problem? Well, yeah& as the title might suggest, its totally about getting all whacked out on drugs, and Im thinking not just nice wholesome herb either. But I kind of suspect that my readership here is lacking in impressionable young folk who will be driven to a life of dissolution by a single pop song, and Im pretty sure that a few of you are in the Been There Done That camp, and might actually be amused.
SotD: Little Fugue by Stokowski
What happened was, in the time of J.S. Bach there were no big orchestras, so most of his music emphasizes that boring stuff like inner detail and emotional tension and shifting soundscapes. When he wanted to write Big Loud Music, he wrote organ music. Which left modern orchestra conductors who really liked Bach with not much to play. So Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) solved that problem by arranging lots of Bach compositions mostly organ pieces for big modern orchestras. This horrified a lot of Bach purists, but the arrangements are mostly pretty great, and that Fugue, properly called BWV 578, is a fine example.
SotD: Somnambule
Id ever heard of CSur de pirate until she popped up on my radio a few weeks ago. Shes from Québéc and I think the name best translates as Pirates Heart , but shes bilingual and at one point referred to herself as Her Pirate Heart , which is cool too. Anyhow, the singing is in French and is very beautiful, and also an oasis of peace in among all the loud male music Ive been hosting here recently. I dont know much more about this piratic performer than what you can read on her Web site or on Wikipedia. The songs are soft, sparsely arranged, and if I had to choose one adjective to describe them itd be feminine .
SotD: Badlands
I was never that huge a Springsteen fan, right through Born to Run; I think I was just too much of a head-banger at the time. But when Darkness on the Edge of Town came out I snapped it right up and went and saw the tour in Toronto. A lot of his songs over the years just go right by me. But Darkness is a hell of a collection of songs, and that tour& OMG. Theres a lot of back-story here; Springsteen had been locked out of recording for three years by a legal fight with his ex-manager, and came out with a real chip on his shoulder.
SotD: Heart To Hang Onto
Heart To Hang Onto is a song by Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane on their 1977 album Rough Mix. This piece is really a recommendation for the whole album, which is an outstanding collection of beautiful songs beautifully performed; its been played as often as anything in my collection, over the years. Heart To Hang Onto is one of Pete Townshends finest compositions, which is a strong statement. The album was maybe Townshends first-ever non-Who outing. He and Ronnie didnt co-write any of the songs; each sings their own, with the other accompanying, along with a gaggle of guest stars including John Entwistle, Charlie Watts, and Eric Clapton.
SotD: Little Wing
Yesterday I quoted DvoYák saying (in 1893) I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them. Somehow he failed to predict that Americas composers would be what they called Negros back then. I want to recommend one piece by such a composer: Little Wing, by Jimi Hendrix.
SotD: DvoYák Symphony No. 9
On the title page of his 9th Symphony manuscript, Antonín DvoYák wrote Z Nového svta From the new world ; its thus become popularly known as the New World Symphony. And by popularly I mean really, right up there among the most-played classical works. I can pretty well guarantee that almost everyone will have heard, and remember, the big swooshy melody at the front of the 2nd movement. The title is literally correct; it was composed in 1893 while DvoYák had a lucrative gig in New York as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. He was fascinated by Afro-American and Native American music; I quote: I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies.
SotD: Any Time
This was written in 1921 by Herbert Happy Lawson and was a country hit for others including Patsy Cline, but todays song is a 2001 performance by Leon Redbone. Its an absolutely fabulous piece of singing and a guaranteed four minutes and two seconds worth of smiles. Very little is known about this artist, including whether Leon Redbone is his real name, or where he actually comes from; theories include Cyprus and Philadelphia. His entire professional career has been out of Toronto, and not that far out either; having survived an airplane crash, he travels only on vehicles with wheels. He plays music of bygone days; this 1921 composition is toward the later end of his repertoire.
SotD: Love To Burn
This is a ten-minute-long guitar-heavy love rumbler from Neil Young and Crazy Horse, from the 1990 album Ragged Glory. Its a beautiful song, with strong message and great tune; about half the running time is one of a set of incandescent guitar breaks. I like a lot of different Neil Young music, but am most moved by the hard-rock outings, as on this record and Zuma. The quality of songs doesnt shift that much from one release to the next, and on the hard-rock offerings you get the big ambitious guitar constructs; whats not to like? On Ragged Glory, along with this one you get Over and Over, Mansion on the Hill, Love and Only Love, and of course F*!#in' Up which, Wikipedia carefully notes, is pronounced Fuckin Up , and is incomprehensible even by Neils standards.
SotD: Shenandoah
This song is so old nobody knows where it came from. It was documented as an Atlantic sea shanty in 1876, and there are suggestions it grew out of an old Afro-American spiritual. So you can bawl it out in a rum-flavored roar, or you can take a twangy campfire twist, or you can do something different, as with the soft, contemplative version Im recommending by Keith Jarrett. Theres another story of the song: A lyric goes Oh, Shenandoah, I loved your daughter , and the father so addressed is apparently a historical figure. Wikipedia calls him Skenendoa, an elected chief of the Oneida, a tall commanding man with a long colorful life he outlived the century of his birth.
SotD: Ball and Chain
Having introduced Cheap Thrills to this series, I cant possibly leave it behind without featuring Ball and Chain. Is it just Janis Joplins greatest vocal performance, or maybe the finest live capture of a blueswoman ever, or maybe (not stretching very far) the hottest vocal performance ever recorded by anyone? Probably not, but its totally not an insane line of inquiry. In the very unlikely event you dont know Ball and Chain, turn this up loud. But get a grip on something firm first. It was written sometime in the Sixties by Big Mama Thornton but its not clear whether she ever got much in the way of royalties; some record-company sleazebag got a new Porsche instead, probably.
SotD: Oh, Sweet Mary
This is from Cheap Thrills, by Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin. This songs a band effort with songwriting credits to all the members; Janis is not front and center. Im not sure its the best performance on the album youd really have to give that to Ball and Chain but its maybe the best-written song. And its a hell of a performance: Hard, melodious, well-crafted rock and roll. Cheap Thrills is not actually a live album; the crowd noise is synthetically inserted. Its special because it represents the peak performance of Big Brother as a group and Janis Joplin personally.
SotD: Colours
Today we have an adorable little girl/boy-duet pop song called Colours off a very pleasing album of the same name by Devon Sproule and Mike ONeill. You can tell shes Canadian by the accent and the u in Colours . The song has a memorable tune and evey moment of it is full of smiles. This is yet another I-heard-it-on-the-radio discovery; I dont know much about Ms Sproule except what Wikipedia says. You may have noticed a lot of Canadian talent showing up in this space. Im not particularly nationalist, especially around the arts; its just that the scene here is sustained by legislation that requires radio stations to play a certain proportion of Canadian stuff, so you cant help but hear it, and while Sturgeons Law applies, there are still plenty of gems to be found.
SotD: Built For Comfort
I saw most of the old blues guys perform, but Willie Dixon was the only one I ever had a conversation with; in maybe 1974 as a teenager, when I was a writer for the student paper at my college, and Willie was playing a show and I asked him what he thought about all these white kids liking the blues. He looked at me like I was an idiot too polite to point out that you play for whoevers gonna pay and said something like Blues is for everyone, man. Anyhow, he wrote like 500 songs, and Ive always thought Built for Comfort was right up there.
SotD: Dread River
You know, were approaching a half-year into this and havent dipped into any pure Dub, which is clearly unsatisfactory. Winston Rodney a.k.a. Burning Spear has already contributed a Song, but if youre gonna dub, you just cant dub any deeper than Burning Spear. Dread River (Jordan River) came up on random shuffle while I was walking to the train the other day, and I smiled heavily for 3:13. Burning Spears most famous album is Marcus Garvey, and this all-dub collection is called Garveys Ghost. Its almost superfluous to pick out just one song, the albums a continuous smooth lyrical bass-heavy flow, the rhythm as deep as Yggdrasils roots.
SotD: The Beat and the Glide
This is a two-song medley, This Beat Goes On and Switchin to Glide, by Canadian rockers The Kings. Most people couldnt pick them out of a line-up, but a whole lot will have heard this song on the radio at some point or another. The Kings This is pure pop/rock fluff, not trying to do anything but entertain you with a cheery tune and a jangly guitar. I think the world just cant possibly have enough of this sort of thing. The lyrics are notable for rhyming wanna and Toronto , and for Nothing matters but the weekend / from a Tuesday point of view.
SotD: 13
Having spent a couple of days in 1958, lets jump fifty-nine years forward to 2017, and enjoy 13, a moody, soulful number by Torontonian Allan Rayman. Its here because I heard it on the radio and liked it. I still havent managed to get a 2018 song into the 2018 Songs of the Day, but Im getting closer. Rayman is not a very public person and his self-presentation is eccentric. His website is about as stripped-down as you can get. He doesnt seem to play any instruments but apparently writes all the music and produces too. Live, he often appears with just a guitarist and a DJ, which I guess we can forgive him for.
SotD: Willow Indigo
Yesterday I took you back to 1958 and that worked out pretty well, so lets stay there. The title above is a little confusing; it refers to Duke Ellingtons awesome album Ellington Indigos, and its titanic take on Willow Weep For Me; but picking just one song is especially tough in this case. We have to be a little careful here, because Ellington Indigos has gone through a bewildering series of releases, with significant variation in the song selection, running order, and arrangements: Theres a good write-up at Jazz History Online. I have the CD, but the link above is to (I think) the original LP release, because you can stream it.
SotD: Fast Freight
My Dad, back when I was a really little elementary-school kid, used to play music by The Kingston Trio, and they stuck to me the way things you hear as a kid do. This is music of a different era, but theres this one song, Fast Freight, that I think is timeless. I actually inherited my Dads copy of their eponymous debut album from 1958, scratchy and in mono, and one time I cued it up, wondering if itd sound like what I remembered. Some of the tunes havent worn well, like when they try to do British accents, and they had basically no sophistication, but they sang interesting harmonies and took some of the songs at insane speed, so theres quite a bit to like.
SotD: Angel From Montgomey
This is one of John Prines greatest, and thats really saying a lot. Its a surging, passionate song about being old and feeling empty. Its got a little novel in the lyrics and a tune anyone can hum along to, so great that you dont notice how sad it is. It originally appeared on Prines self-titled debut, which has already provided another Days Song, but never really got into the mainstream until Bonnie Raitt got her teeth into it on Streetlights in 1974. Bonnie says I think Angel from Montgomery probably has meant more to my fans and my body of work than any other song, and it will historically be considered one of the most important ones I've ever recorded.
SotD: The Longships
This is off Enyas Watermark album, which sold a zillion copies and put Orinoco Flow on a few peoples can-never-hear again list because every radio in the freaking world played it all the time in 1988-89. Even if youre one of those, there are lots of other things on this record to like, and this one I like especially. Now, Enya would never ever let a rough edge or a raw tone creep into her creations, and the artifacts on her recordings could never ever be performed live because they are the result of prodigious over-tracking and other studio wizardry; although perhaps one should say witchery?
SotD: Walk Away
Way back in the Songs of the Day, in February I wrote about a Joe Walsh tune and added If I keep doing this, hell get a rocker into Song of the Day. I have, and now he has: Seems to me / You dont want to talk about it / Seems to me / You just turn your pretty head and walk away. Great stuff. You know, there was some bad James Gang karma back in the day. When I was sort of in the biz, as the resident house manager for all the rock concerts at a Canadian University, Id talk to roadies and there was this epithet: James Gang Roadie .
SotD: Attention Please
Were going a little off the beaten track here; Attention Please is the title track from the 2011 album of the same name by Boris, which Wikipedia describes as an experimental band , whatever that means. They are from Japan and play mostly extremely loud drone metal, but with occasional excursions into soft moody stuff, for example this song; they are fabulous musicians. Most of Boris albums are mostly atmospheric guitar noise, but the story I read somewhere is that vocalist/guitarist Wata wanted to do some crooning and the band was OK with that. Boris have several albums I wholeheartedly recommend; my faves are Akuma no Uta and their collaboration with Sunn O))), Altar, which has an all-star cast and also some slightly less metallic stuff.
SotD: Steve Reichs Sextet
Steve Reich is one of the larger figures in Twentieth-century New (as in non-pop) music, and has done well because his works are tuneful, dreamy, and engaging. Sextet is my personal fave because, along with all those other things, its got loads of energy. Its 25-ish minutes long; the five minutes of the last movement are the highlight and a really great introduction to Reich, if this is new territory to you. Sextet is in five movements for six players, two pianos and percussion with lots of hocketing. Its dreamy then flashy; I loved it the first time I heard it and still do.
SotD: With You There to Help Me
Im going back to the ones that I know / With whom I can be what I want to be& This is the opening number of Jethro Tulls 1970 album Benefit. I dont know if its absolutely the albums highlight, but its a fine song. I suppose most few readers are young enough to have known about Tull in their prime. They really were the complete package: Great songs, polished musicianship, and they put on a hell of a show. There were a lot of different members over the years, but the sound was always built around the charisma and throaty singing of Ian Anderson and the tasteful and forceful guitar of Martin Barre.
SotD: du Pré Plays Elgar
I have heard sober-minded people argue that Elgars Cello Concerto played by Jacqueline du Pré is the single greatest instrumental performance of any piece of music, any genre, any instrument, ever. Im not sure Id go that far that the claim is not crazy at all. Fortunately for us, it was captured beautifully, sound and pictures too. Du Pré was an interesting character, torn away from the world of music in mid-life by multiple sclerosis. She led a colorful life, and I really enjoyed the 1998 biography by her sister Hilary, A Genius in the Family: An Intimate Biography of Jacueline du Pré (also sold as Hilary and Jackie) but I see its at least semi-out of print; keep your eyes open in used bookstores.
SotD: You Really Got Me
Oops, weve been too long without a Maximum Rock and Roll song; thus this Kinks classic. The Kinks are cool but to be honest, there are only a couple of their songs that stick in your head from one year to the next; this is one of them. But if youre too young to have seen them perform at their peak, you missed something special. I remember a concert at some huge hockey rink in the early Eighties; I have rarely in my life been so entertained. It was a big stage with two long runways out into the crowd; one for Ray Davies, the other for Dave.
SotD: BWV 131
This is by Bach. Youll sometimes hear it spoken of as Cantata no. 131 but thats misleading, because its among the first maybe the first of his cantatas. The 131 is its entry in the BWV works-of-Bach numbering system. It doesnt actually have a name, but the text is from the 130th Psalm in German and begins Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir Out of the depths I call, Lord, to you . Its exquisite. As I write this, its 210 years old. A mere twelve years ago, I blogged about this work and about cantatas in general; how they came to be and why there are so many of them.
SotD: Stone Flower
These essays have been love letters to songs, but in this case its really to an album: Santanas Caravanserai, from 1972. I its not just a disc-full of songs, its a 51-minute explosion of rhythm and passion, the songs are just pieces of the puzzle. Since its the song of the day, I have to pick one: Its Stone Flower, written by Antônio Carlos Jobim, whos appeared here before. To the extent Caravanserai has a hit, itd be Song of the Wind, or maybe Every Step of the Way. I like Stone Flower because along with the guitar/percussion assault, it embeds a nice friendly little pop song.
SotD: Norwegian Wood
Ah, a Beatles classic, everybody loves those. But I actually want to highlight a performance by Patricia Barber, who takes this song further than any Beatle, living or dead. Patricias appeared in this series before, which puts her in pretty select company, and Im OK with that, Ive never understood why shes not an international megastar. Norwegian Wood is from a live album called Live: A Fortnight in France, recorded on tour, which is utterly charming end to end. As is almost everything shes ever shipped. The notion of taking a simple pop tune and wrapping an extended jazz tangle is not exactly new or surprising.
SotD: Gone, Gone, Gone
Or, in full, Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On), written and recorded by the Everly Brothers in 1964. I ran across it on the Robert Plant/Alison Kraus collaboration Raising Sand, which is really a fine piece of work. Id never really listened to the Everlys till I started writing this, but that version is excellent too. That Plant/Krauss collaboration came out of the blue back in 2007 and sold a lot of copies, and made a lot of people smile. Its produced, and the songs curated, by T Bone Burnett; he did a fine job. When Plant and Krauss went out on tour, they threw in a few Led Zeppelin songs, most of which were absolutely charming.
SotD: Its Wonderful
The full title is They Say Its Wonderful, written in 1946 by Irving Berlin, and since then covered by more or less every crooner living and dead. The version I want to write about is off the awesome John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, recorded in 1963. I have read more than one critic claiming that this is the best album ever recorded. Im not sure Id go that far, but it really is very very good music indeed. Picking just one song off it is tough, because theyre all so great. Theres sort of a formula; Hartman glides through an old standard, making his huge baritone float and dance, while Coltrane and McCoy Tyner (who should be on the cover) hang golden ornaments on the walls of the song.
SotD: Falling
This is Julee Cruise singing the Twin Peaks Theme, composed by Angelo Badalamenti; David Lynch gets a songwriting credit so I suppose he contributed lyrics. Like Audrey Horne said, I love this music; isnt it too dreamy? Some dreams are nightmares. The sky is still blue The clouds come and go Yet something is different I work in a building in downtown Vancouver that makes a visual statement; its lobby is full of light and soaring timber, and theres a Fazioli piano that I hear cost $300K and anyone can play; usually pretty anodyne stuff. But one time I came back from lunch and this guy was playing the Twin Peaks Theme, the piano melody going up and up into the light and space; it was almost unbearably intense.
SotD: S.O.B.
This is by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, outta Denver, from 2015. Youve probably heard it on a radio near you. Its a fine, stirring, uplifting tune that happens to be about detox. I dont know much about Rateliff, but the first time the song grabbed my attention and I started listening seriously, my eyes widened and I was thinking sounds like delerium tremens. Several people who are very close to me are alcoholics all now sober at least for the moment, thank goodness and so Ive seen the dark side of that street but Ive only ever read about delerium tremens.
SotD: Immigrant Song
Well, there has to be something here from Led Zep, and Im picking this because, when I was sixteen and just feeling my way into the mysterious forest of popular music, someone said Hey I got this new record (that would be Led Zep III) and he dropped the needle on Immigrant Song, and in that instant I became a hard-rock fan; and Ill be proud to die one. Its a totally great tune. I try to keep the Song of the Day a little off the beaten track and I was thinking of going with Kashmir instead because the guys in the band say its their favorite Led Zep song, and I like it a lot.
SotD: Stolen Moments
Oliver Nelson died in 1975 at 43 of a heart attack; hed be a legend if hed lived a little longer. Nowadays hes mostly remembered for The Blues and the Abstract Truth from 1961, and Stolen Moments is the song on that record thats always stuck to the back of my brain. The original cover and the 1990 re-issue;both with superb typography. Nelson was a University-trained composer, who did well by jazz but was always writing music for one type of ensemble or another. The Blues and the Abstract Truth is a straight-ahead jazz album with an all-star band including Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Paul Chambers, and Roy Haynes.
SotD: Mahler #9, Adagio
In yesterdays song, Lou Reed declaims Sittin' down by the fire / Ooo, the radio does play / A little classical music there& Hey, good idea! The fourth movement of Symphony No. 9 by Gustav Mahler is labeled IV. Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend. The German means something like Very slowly, with reserve and its slow all right but its not reserved at all, its full of wrenching howls of emotion. The symphony is massive, typically eighty-plus minutes or more to play, and frankly Ive no particular love for the first three movements. Theyre tuneful in places but bombastic in others, with no movement, no feeling that they know where theyre going and want to take me along.
SotD: Sweet Jane
Some people just go out dancing / other people like us we gotta work. Lou Reeds Sweet Jane has been special to me since the first time it crossed my radar, which I dont remember since it was in the Seventies. This may be Lou Reeds masterpiece. Im pretty old, but too young to have been into the Velvet Underground. But I was living in dingy basement back in those days when someone brought home Lou Reeds Rock n Roll Animal and oh my goodness, every note on that record spoke to me, and it still does. I blogged at length on the subject a dozen years ago, Let me quote myself: Lets see: the band is tight as any famous-name classical string quartet, the guitars are orchestrated and played well; Lous vocals are wasted-sounding, which is appropriate, but the phrasing and timing is right up there.
SotD: Working Class Hero
Its May First which is to say Happy Commie Day! Let me look for a Song of the Day in that spirit& oh hey, that wasnt hard: There's room at the top they're telling you still / But first you must learn how to smile as you kill. John Lennon. Stolen from The Music Court, which looks like a cool place. Hey, and after all its a good song, easy to sing along in your head. You can quibble: Its about the class not the work in working-class, about growing up in a shitty dead-end (working-class) town in a shitty dead-end (working-class) school.
SotD: Sleepless Nights
This was written around 1960 by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (an interesting songwriting team Id never heard of before) and made a hit then by the Everly Brothers. But the versions I care about are by Emmylou Harris, especially her version with Gram Parsons. The Bryants Its about the simplest country melody imaginable, sung super slow, so the lyrics are few: Oh, these sleepless nights / Will break my heart in two. Im really hard-pressed to pick between Ms Harris solo version on Pieces of the Sky (a wonderful collection, by the way) or the collaboration with Gram Parsons on a Flying Burrito Brothers album also called Sleepless Nights, which features her on several songs (extra-wonderful).
SotD: Aint No Sunshine
So sad, Charles Neville of The Neville Brothers died. Ive been wanting to do a song from the Brothers but I went looking for good live video and turned up their superb take on Aint no Sunshine which obviously deserves a spot, so really today belongs to Bill Withers, but Im going to use that Nevilles video which, appropriately, features Charles. People dont appreciate how totally great they were. So many wonderful songs, live and recorded, their concerts sold out, particularly anything at home in New Orleans, and they sold quite a few records; but were never really big stars. OK, enough of that, Ill really try to throw them a Song of the Day before this series runs out of gas.
SotD: Third Degree
Its been a while here since the Song of the Day was a straight-up no-foolin-around blues number. Lets let Eddie Boyd fix that problem. Third Degree was co-written by Eddie and Willie Dixon in 1953 and was something of a hit. Im a blues fan but didnt know about Eddie Boyd till I ran across this on a fabulous compilation called The Chess Story that apparently isnt for sale any more, but I bet you can find it in the used-record and CD bins in a record store somewhere. If you see one, snap it up. Chess Records is an interesting story.
SotD: Silver Dagger
Its an old folk song, old enough in America to perhaps have come from Britain; there are variants aplenty. But for most people today, including me, Silver Dagger is that Joan Baez song. Ms Baez has a beautiful voice, great skill in using it, and (maybe most important) fabulously good taste in picking what to sing. Heres the cover of her debut album from 1960. Its my own photo of my own copy. A little sticker in the corner reveals that at some point I paid six dollars for it. I dont know if this is my fave by Ms Baez; you have to think of El Preso Numero Nueve and Diamonds and Rust (which by the way she wrote).
SotD: Gloria
The last time I plugged a song called Gloria, it was a setting of liturgical text from the Mass. Patti Smiths isnt; it begins Jesus died for someones sins, but not mine. So, profane not sacred, even though the full title on the album says Gloria: In Excelsis Deo. Also, one of the great rock vocals ever recorded by anyone. This is another piece I blogged about before, in which I used the phrase loud and uncompromising but still lyrical and lovely . Ill stand by that. Also, Ms Smith seems to be a generally decent, sane, strong sort of person. Shes come through hard times and still goes out on the road.
SotD: Fascination Street
This is my favorite Cure song, and the version Im recommending is one of the best-sounding electric-music recordings ever. I like the music even though I never really understood the whole emo/goth thing; thats OK, I can like Dub without getting Rastafarianism, and Bach while puzzled by Lutheranism. The only Cure music I own is a 1990 set of remixes called Mixed Up which I have listened to many many times; the songs are all good the production job is fantastic. I blogged about it back in 2007, dive in if you want more details. Heres what I wrote about Fascination Street back then: Oh my goodness, the opening is heroic and symphonic and danceable all at once; spires of sound topple into shifting textures of tone and resolve into mainstream guitar-and-drums rock flourishes.
SotD: Nulla In Mundo Pax
The full title is Nulla In Mundo Pax Sincera, which will leave many blank. A better way to put it is Emma Kirkby singing Vivaldi , a combination that will bring a smile to the faces of many who listen to any classical music at all. Antonio and Emma both have good hair. Ms Kirkby is a soprano who has made a career of Early Music; her voice is like silver with a dusting of sugar. Vivaldi is a dead Italian who wrote an absurdly huge amount of music, of which almost all is good and a lot is pretty great. Hes got a marked style: You dont have to be a deep classical-music maven to hear music on the radio and say oh, thats gotta be Vivaldi. He picked the wrong century to be born in; he died in poverty, but The Four Seasons is the best-selling classical recording ...
SotD: All Blues
Obviously theres nothing obscure about Miles Davis Kind of Blue, probably the best-selling (and one of the most-praised) jazz albums ever. But All Blues is a little more subdued than the rest of the songs and its got a spine-chilling little highlight that Ive never noticed anyone else pointing out. With that, and with some notes from Miless autobiography, I might have something new even for long-time Miles fans. That autobiography is quite a book and I totally recommend it. Its brutally, unflinchingly honest; If you already sort of knew that Miles had a mean streak, you will for sure after reading this.
SotD: Just Like This
Once again a Song of the Day thats a song from today, more or less; there is actual musical life out there on the pop charts. And Something Just Like This isnt just pop, its particularly poppy pop featuring teen sentiment and minimal structure; but hey, its a pretty tune and its got a beat, you could dance to it. Its a collaboration between Coldplay and The Chainsmokers, and I dont know the first thing about either of them. I mean, weve been hearing Coldplay on the radio pretty regularly since the turn of the century, but none of those songs ever made me want to turn it up.
SotD: Elizabeth Reed
The full title is In Memory of Elizabeth Reed; it was written by Dickey Betts of The Allman Brothers Band and is a highlight on their live album At Fillmore East, a collection of songs that is very special to a lot of people, including me. Itd be pretty obviously jazz if it werent for all the brilliant rock-guitar improv. The album is one of those rare occasions when someone did a great job of capturing a live performance by an ensemble at the absolute top of their form. I knew people whove seen the Allmans lots and Ive never heard anyone say they played better than on this record.
SotD: Moustaki
After all that hardass rock the last couple of days, I feel the need of something softer. Alors, profitons dune très douce chanson française de Georges Moustaki& oh wait. Im talking about Georges Moustaki, a francophone singer-songwriter of generally Mediterranean extraction who was hot stuff when I was in high school a hundred years back. This is seriously sweet sonorous stuff. When I get into someone obscure (to 21st-century Anglophones) like Moustaki, I have a hard time mentioning just one song in a large body of work, so Ill mention and link to a couple. Did I say generally Mediterranean ? Per Wikipedia, he was born Giuseppe Mustacchi in Alexandria to parents who were Italian-speaking Francophile Greek Jews from the island of Corfu.
SotD: Hoochie Koo
Yesterday I veered gleefully off the road of High Culture into the musical gutter. So, lets hang out down here one more day. For your pleasure I offer Rock & Roll, Hoochie Koo . It was written in 1970 by Rick Derringer, who is OK by me, originally for Johnny Winter. Ricks laid down some ace recordings both on his own and with one or more Winters. Rick Derringers list of collaborators includes the Winters, Steely Dan, Weird Al, and the World Wrestling Federation. I guess that makes him a Great American. Fortunately for you, I know the definitive version of Hoochie Koo, which is on a live album called Roadwork by Edgar Winters White Trash.
SotD: Sharp Dressed Man
This series has been getting kind of refined and intellectual in recent days, so were going to fix that right now. I dont think Ive ever heard a ZZ Top song I didnt like, and Billy Gibbons guitar sound is unequaled in its grit and its steel-spined groove. You also have to love the performances; the guys clearly dont take themselves too seriously (I once described their moves as a back-beat pavane ). Sharp Dressed Man is pure fun. Now, lets get past one big issue. Bill Gibbons has a really dirty mind, and enjoys sharing it. I mean, songs like Lagrange and Tube-snake Boogie arent exactly subtle, and you might try to spin a story about how theyre a metaphor or something, then he comes down to the front of the stage, growls Know what Im talkin about? and flashes a leer half the size of Texas.
SotD: Mishima
This isnt a song, its a movie soundtrack, I hope thats OK. Its by Philip Glass, and the movie is Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters from 1985. The name refers to Yukio Mishima, a Japanese novelist who went crazy and tried to lead a restore-the-sacred-Empire putsch against the Japanese government in 1970 and, when it predictably failed, committed seppuku. Mishima was a loathsome person and my single attempt to read one of his books ran afoul of stinking heaps of metaphysical bushwah inside of a hundred pages, so I have no interest in seeing the movie. But its a damn fine set of songs.
SotD: Misa Criolla
Written in 1964 by Argentinian Ariel Ramírez, Misa Criolla is the Mass in Spanish set to music with a sound and structure that combines several indigenous styles. You know those buskers that set up in public markets everywhere in colorful South-American outfits with giant Pan-pipes and guitars both huge and tiny? That style of music. Misa Criolla is great stuff, sold a zillion copies back there, and I cant imagine anyone not liking it. Its is a little over twenty minutes long, but every minute is worth hearing. To bring it into Song of the Day territory, Im recommending the second movement, Gloria, which is the center of the piece and is well under ten minutes.
SotD: La Isla Bonita
This is a beautiful and simple little Spanish-inflected melody, written by Madonna, Patrick Leonard, and Bruce Gaitsch. It sold a lot of records for her and is a staple of her live shows. Last night I dreamt of San Pedro& Wikipedia says the song was written as an instrumental, then Madonna added words and melody. But it sounds like a single voice and vision. Im an admirer of Madonna but not really a big fan of most of her music. The actual songs only rarely rise to greatness, as La Isla Bonita does. But by pure force of will she became, for a number of years, the sexiest, most attention-worthy woman in the world.
SotD: Hurt
No, not Trent Reznor singing the moany overwrought Nine Inch Nails version; I mean Johnny Cashs take on American IV: The Man Comes Around, his last studio album. Its grainy and sad and generally awesome. To his credit, Trent Reznor said that song isnt mine anymore. That whole American IV collection is pretty great. Its got an triumphant Bridge Over Troubled Water, sharing the vocals with Fiona Apple, a straight-ahead only-slightly-hilarious run through Depeche Modes Personal Jesus, a duet with Nick Cave on Im So Lonesome I Could Cry, and a deeply beautiful performance of Danny Boy. But Hurt is something special.
SotD: Roads to Moscow
Even on the oldies stations, you never hear Al Stewart any more. In my youth he was a pretty big deal though, and had mega-hits with Year of the Cat and Time Passages. Roads to Moscow wasnt a big hit but it was always my fave among his songs. I listened to it again the other night for the first time in years, and I was moved again by its story, and by its melodic grace. Als always been a bit (to use a British word) naff; goofy-looking, yucking it up, not much of a voice, not rehearsing much. But boy, some of those songs can get their hooks into you.
SotD: Doin Summertime
Ive always liked Doin Time by Sublime which is (gasp!) approaching twenty years old. But I have a secret reason, because the breathy backing track is off a record approaching sixty years old by Herbie Mann that my Dad bought when I was still in short pants, and I still have the original, and love it. Well, and also because its based on Summertime; Ive been in a musically-literate room where someone called it the greatest song ever written and while somebody else said What about Good Vibrations? a few heads were nodding. Lets take a trip through the times. Above, the needle drops at the start of the Doin Time official video.
SotD: White Room
Let me tell you a story. In 1968 when I was 13, my then-43-year-old Dad, a Professor of Agriculture, had a business trip to London, which was a white-hot center of the whole Sixties thing. He walked into a record store and asked them to sell him a couple of records for his son, whatever was hot. He came home with two Cream singles: White Room backed with Those Were the Days, and Badge b/w What a Bringdown. Was your Dad ever that cool? Anyhow, that means Ive loved White Room for fifty years. I ran off to my room to stick in the little plastic doohickey so I could fit it on my record player turned up to 45RPM; I only had one speaker, but it was big.
SotD: Allegris Miserere
The works title is really just Miserere ( have mercy on us ), but since so many composers have asked for mercy, and since Gregorio Allegri was sort of a one-hit wonder, everybody says it like in the title above. I think that we can each use all the divine mercy we can get, but maybe your need is less than mine. The (Latin, of course) text is Psalm 51. Its a little over twelve minutes of simple soaring melody, built of a short choral fragment repeated five times, with a variation last time around. Its got a colorful history. This Miserere was apparently written in 1638 for the Catholic church and became regarded as what today wed call Intellectual Property of the Vatican; a Pope forbade that it be performed anywhere but in the Sistine Chapel, and also that any copy should leave the Chapel.
SotD: Middle of the Road
In case nobody noticed, I have a thing for loud-voiced women singing in front of heavy electric-guitar noise. Any list of those has to have Chrissie Hynde near the top. She wrote and sings this, provides some of the guitar noise herself, and throws in a triumphant harmonica break. Her voice is unique. Shes from Akron, Ohio and her intonation is pure Middle American White Girl, none of the traditional Southern or Black or British rock-vocal angles. Theres considerable songwriting and arranging skill in setting things up so her not-terribly-high not-terribly-sharp not-terribly-scratchy voice cuts through all the guitar chording. Anyhow, I love the way she sounds Learning to Crawl is probably the Pretenders best album, and you could have a long argument about the best tune on it, because its got Chain Gang and My City Was Gone.
SotD: The Boys of Summer
This was released by Don Henley of the Eagles in 1984, his words to music by Mike Campbell. Its only a minor member of the California-rock canon but its special to me, and I still love to hear it. Don Henley At some point in time not too long after 1984, I took a winter trip from Vancouver to Regina to visit my mother, by Greyhound bus since I was kind of broke at the time. Thats two days in a seat more or less, not an experience Id ever hope to repeat. I had some way to listen to radio through headphones; The Boys of Summer was hot that winter, and I cant ever hear it without remembering the bus ride.
SotD: Feel It Still
Another contemporary well, a year old Song of the Day. What happened was, I liked Feel It Still on the radio, and liked that it quoted from Please Mr. Postman, and when I went looking for video to see what Portugal. The Man were like live, the first I found featured a stage surrounded by projected words reading NO COMPUTERS UP HERE, JUST LIVE INSTRUMENTS . So I was hooked. I dunno, theyre from Alaska, the singers got a crystalline countertenor, theyre not that dynamic live, the vocal arrangements are sharper than any razor. Its got a beat, you could dance to it. My eleven-year-old daughter can sing along, thinks theyre almost as good as Taylor Swift.
SotD: Plutonian Nights
The Nubians of Plutonia was recorded by Sun Ra and his Arkestra before 1960 and released in 1966, but its not really music of either period, its of the distant future. Or at least thats what Sun Ra claimed; mind you, he also claimed he was born on Saturn and that aliens were going to be arriving any minute. Having said that, Plutonian Nights is one of the coolest jazz tracks ever recorded in any galaxy; Im glad it was this one. Sun Ra combined ludicrous costumery and good-humored erudite craziness with strong songwriting, the exceptional talents of saxophonist James Gilmore, and pretty deft keyboard playing when he felt like it.
SotD: Crazy on You
Back in the Seventies when dinosaurs walked the earth, Heart was a pretty big one, and unique among hard (occasionally) rock bands in being woman-fronted, by sisters Anne and Nancy Wilson. Crazy on You was their debut single and for my money their best song ever, and one of the better arguments why Rock & Roll at its peak reaches above all other forms of music. While their line-up changed around over the ears it was always Anne on ear-splitting vocals, Nancy on hot acoustic guitar and harmony, and Some Guy on electric. On Dreamboat Annie, the wonderful album containing Crazy on You, That Guy was Roger Fisher, a founding member who sounded fabulous when he was playing behind Anne and Nancy but never really amounted to much thereafter.
SotD: Up On Cripple Creek
This is a chestnut from The Band, written by Robbie Robertson and sung by Levon Helm. Its from 1969 but sounds like its hundreds of years old, part of the underlying fabric of everything. I suppose nearly everyones heard it, but its worth another listen. Theres nothing ground-breaking or innovative here, just a straightforward verse/chorus thing like you might have heard around a campfire or in a tavern in my grandparents grandparents grandparents time. Well, there is the funky wah-wah on Garth Hudsons Hammond, and the swirling instrumental polyphony, but really its a just a good old-fashioned singalong tune. And Levon Helm sounds like the guy at the next table over, assuming that guy was always flawlessly in tune.
SotD: Nocturne No. 1 Op. 9
This is the first of Chopins Nocturnes, written when he was only about 20. My love is not specifically for this piece but for all twenty-one Nocturnes, but thats hours of music and you have to start somewhere. No more beautiful music for piano has ever been written. Eleven years ago I wrote a big long blog piece on the Nocturnes, with pictures and lots of exposition; if you want to find out more, its a good place to start and Im not going to reiterate. However, I did learn a couple of things when I popped up the Wikipedia article on this piece.
SotD: Lets Go Downtown
The Song of the Day needs a rocker every so often to keep up the energy level, and its never had any Neil Young ever, so lets solve both problems with Come On Baby Lets Go Downtown, co-written with the late Danny Whitten. A triumphant rock holler carried on arching guitar lines, its a centerpiece of Tonights the Night, which is a triumph and a tragedy. Danny Whitten Tonights the Night was recorded and released in 1975, but Downtown was recorded live, with Whitten on guitar, in 1970. Whitten fell into the narcotics tarpit and died the same night Neil fired him from the band, as did longtime roadie Bruce Berry, in the months before the records release.
SotD: Desafinado
This is a 1959 bossa nova by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça; the title means something like Out of Tune and is exquisitely incorrect. It has been recorded a staggering number of times. Im here to talk about my favorite version, with Jobim guesting on a recording by Stan Getz and João Gilberto. Its on a 1964 album called Getz/Gilberto, which is fabulous end-to-end. It also includes Girl from Ipanema which remains so beautiful all those decades later, although its gender politics probably havent aged well. Heres a story about this record: Down Beat, the jazz magazine, used to have this feature called the blindfold test where theyd play some tracks for a musician without telling him or her who they were, and ask for one- to five-star ratings.
SotD: Moana Chimes
Dear Readers, as I write this I am sitting near the blue Pacific in a place called Napili on the island of Maui. When I post this, it will be from Vancouver on the morning after this Pacific expedition. Moana Chimes is Hawaiian music, performed by Ledward Kapanaa and Bob Brozman. It swings softly and complexly and yeah, sounds like Hawaii feels. When youre in the Pacific Northwest and it gets to be March, schoolkids have a Spring Break and after six months of short grey days and long wet nights, Maui gets awfully appealing, and is one six-hour plane ride away.
SotD: Highway Star
Ah& Deep Purple, now thats what I call Maximum Rock And Roll. And Highway Star is the maximum maximum. Also, it comes with a perfect live recording. When I say Deep Purple I refer, of course, to any iteration of the band that included Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, and Ian Gillan. Did I say iteration ? Yeah, they had a lot, and some were mostly cashing in on a profitable hard-rock franchise. Fortunately, you can ignore all that crap, just buy one album and youll have all the Deep Purple anyone needs: Made In Japan. Along with Highway Star, it has masterful versions of Smoke on the Water, Lazy, Space Truckin , and especially Child In Time, which may edge the others in musical depth, but doesnt approach the raw Dionysian power of Highway Star.
Shifting Camera Choices
We just got back from a week in Maui; obviously, I took a lot of pictures. I think my choice of tools and techniques is pretty mainstream, so when I suddenly change them I wonder if Im part of a news story. As of this trip, I treat my camera (Fuji X-T1) and phone (Pixel 2) as peers, and which one I reach for depends on what kind of picture I want to take. And almost always, theres big glass on the Fuji (the Samyang 135mm F2 or Fujis own excellent 55-200 zoom). Im wondering if normal lenses on real cameras have a future.
SotD: Blue Moon
Blue Moon was written in 1934 by Rogers and Hart, and has been performed since then by more or less everyone. It makes anyone sound good, good performers sound great, and great performers melt your heart. Nobody could ever say whose version is the best, but today Im shouting out to Billie Holiday, Elvis, and the Cowboy Junkies. Billie Holiday had a naturally twisty voice and on her take applied that twist with wisdom to what is, after all, a really simple melody. This is on her very first album of original material, Billie Holiday Sings (only available on vinyl), and she covered it again, live in Europe, on Billies Blues; but the original is better.
SotD: Pork Pie Hat
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is a Charles Mingus jazz standard, first recorded by his band in 1959, and since then performed by many others, with voice and without. The version closest to my heart is a Jeff Beck electric-guitar instrumental. [Wait, didnt you have one of those yesterday!? -Ed.] [You say that like its a bad thing. -T] The song was originally conceived of as a tribute to Lester Young, a saxophonist, recently deceased back then, who had worn one. Ive loved Mingus music since I first heard it. He always had a big band and their big showpieces always involved playing really loud and really fast; as close as jazz ever gets to head-bangin metal music.
SotD: Ended as Lovers
The full title is Cause Weve Ended as Lovers and for almost everyone its that beautiful slow instrumental on Jeff Becks fabulous Blow by Blow album, with a dedication to Roy Buchanan, whos already contributed a Song of the Day. That was my take until I started writing this and found out it was not only written by Stevie Wonder, but was recorded on Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta, featuring his then-wife. Im mostly here to talk about Jeffs version but Stevie and Syreeta do it up very nicely too. I can remember a snarky wise-ass review of Blow by Blow, in Rolling Stone I think, where they said something like The late Sixties had way too much guitar wanking, is 1975 too soon to take up the subject again? Apparently it was fine, because it sold a million copies.
SotD: Sour Times
In the early Nineties there was suddenly this thing called Trip hop, which manifested out of another dimension and came to earth in Bristol, not otherwise famous for very much. Its distinguishing characteristic is being slow and dreamy and, I always thought, kind of sexy. Sour Times is probably the most famous Trip-hop song ever, by Portishead, along with Massive Attack the canonical trip-hopheads. When you listen to it first, you tend to just sink into the slow melody and Beth Gibbons beautiful, haunting singing. But theres a lot more happening; this one is worth listening to a few times. There are two recordings of this song; it was the big hit on their debut album Dummy, and appeared on Roseland NYC Live, in an elaborate arrangement with a big orchestra.
Where Yegges Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first of all, I should encourage people to go read these pieces and, second, point out the things that are counterfactual. The posts Now at Medium (sigh, it makes me sad when another indie blogger migrates off their own platform): why I left Google and Who will steal Android from Google?
SotD: At the 100th Meridan
Almost every Canadians list of Songs-of-the-Day is going to include a Tragically Hip number or two, and Im no exception. They had a lot of great tunes and this one is right up there. Cant write this without getting kind of damp, because we lost Gord yesterday it feels like. If youre not Canadian and have no idea who The Hip are or who Gord was, listen to this anyhow and if you like rock music youll probably like it a lot. Gord Downie and Rob Baker in 1989. For non-Canadians heres the tl;dr: The Hip were a guitar-rock band with strong songwriting, a charismatic singer in Gord Downie, and a fabulous sound based on Downies voice cutting through Rob Bakers wall of harmonious electric-guitar thunder.
SotD: A Love Supreme
Im talking two tracks today, named Acknowledgment and Resolution, but there are millions of people who love them but dont know their names. They are the A Side of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, recorded in 1964 and one of the best-selling jazz records of all time. Thing is, most people just start at the beginning of the album and stick with it till the end. Or if youre a traditionalist like me, the LP. Either way everyone just thinks of it as A Love Supreme. Its a hell of a piece of music. Since this is modern jazz, the harmonies arent classical, but you stop noticing after a few seconds, because John is taking you on a trip and he knows where hes going and its hard to resist his pull.
SotD: Appassionata
Formally, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, by Ludwig van Beethoven. The name Appassionata was attached not by Ludwig but by a music publisher ten years after his death. But its stuck because well, the music is really passionate; soft and intimate then loud and fast. Its usually the highlight of any concert where its performed. I heard someone say on the radio once, about Beethoven: Maybe not the best melodist or orchestrator to have ever composed, but unique in creating the feeling that each successive note is absolutely the only one that could possibly have been chosen. This is like that.
SotD: Barton Hollow
The Civil Wars were on every radio for while there around 2010, and I liked it when they were; a refreshing break from electric noise (hey, I like electric noise, but still) and especially from synthetically-constructed pop sugar-candy. Barton Hollow is definitely my fave track, and I cant imagine anyone not liking it. I have Barton Hollow the album, and its mostly very good. Interestingly, the title track has a noticeably different sound; a little grittier, a little less pure, a little friction in the arrangement. I initially thought that the production quality wasnt up to the standards of the rest of the record.
SotD: The Man Who Sold The World
This is a David Bowie song that I gather was mostly forgotten Id certainly never heard it until it popped up on Nirvanas MTV Unplugged In New York. This was in 1993, after which Bowie apparently added it to his regular live set; which is cool. The whole Unplugged set is great; it doesnt have any Nirvana chestnuts, just obscure numbers and covers. My second-favorite song on it is Plateau, for which a few Meat Puppets joined the band and has the immortal lyric You see a lot up there but dont be scared / Who needs action when you got words.
SotD: Thats Right!
This is a cheery bright fast polyrhythmic acoustic guitar instrumental by Jesse Cook. Like a few other numbers here at Song of the Day, I discovered this one by killing time in a record store; mind you, this was HMV in its declining days, not one of the cool-magnets of yore. But I loved the tune and asked the clerk and bought the record. The record is called Vertigo and all of it is at least listenable and at best memorable; Id call Thats Right! the highlight. It also has Sade guesting very prettily on a couple of numbers. On the YouTube linked below, Jesse intros the song and explains that it combines Bo Diddley and Bhangra rhythms with Zydeco accordion (played on Vertigo by Buckwheat Zydeco himself).
SotD: Persephone
My favorite living jazz musician, and sometimes my favorite living musician, is Patricia Barber, a Chicagoan songwriter, singer, piano player, and bandleader. Shes really good at all four of those things, and an evening with her band is one of the most intense musical experiences you can track down at this point in the twenty-first century. Modern jazzbos dont have greatest hits as such, but if they did, Persephone would probably be hers. Disclosure: Heres how deranged a fan I am. Once a year or so, I spend some surplus airline points and sneak off for a Monday evening in Chicago, where Ms Barber plays at The Green Mill (once Al Capones favorite bar) and you can go see her for some absurdly small amount of money; the crowd consists of about half locals and half devotees from around the world; Ive sat next to people from Taiwan and ...
SotD: I Put A Spell On You
This song was written in 1956 by Screamin Jay Hawkins as a ballad, but he claims the producer got him drunk in the studio and thats when he started Screamin, and people loved it, so he never stopped. Since then, its been recorded a whole lot. Im here to recommend a mini video festivals worth of takes, and one recording, and this may be a little weird but I think its the best out there, by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I actually think the Jay Hawkins story is a little sad. He was a good songwriter with a huge, thunderous voice, and after this song he turned his stage act into a sort of slapstick voodoo-shaman sideshow.
How To Stop Kinder Morgan
Yesterday, I was arrested and charged with Civil Contempt for failing to respect an injunction forbidding protesters from coming within 5 meters of the property where Kinder Morgan is trying to bring a pipeline for tar-sands bitumen to the Pacific. Herewith a few words on why this kind of action might work and how to go about doing it. Well, and I guess I should tack on a note about why the pipeline is a stupid idea and should be stopped, but I suspect most readers here are already on-board with that. But before any of that, my strongest thanks to our gracious hosts, the good people of the Coast Salish, whose unceded territory we were on.
SotD: Spanish Pipedream
John Prine, now theres an original. Hes an ordinary guy with a beat-up face and a beat-up voice, and his songs get played by folkies and rockers in bars and basements across America. Not outside it though I bet, he is just so American, and I mean that in the best possible way. Spanish Pipedream is a cheerful little uptempo number thatll make you smile. Its from a long time ago but the sentiment is fresh: Blow up your TV / throw away the papers / move to the country / build yourself a home. I stage-managed a John Prine concert sometime in the Seventies my beer and rent money at college and Id call it in the top five concerts Ive seen in my life, and Ive seen a lot.
SotD: The Dry Cleaner
I already blogged about The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, by Joni Mitchell and Charles Mingus, eleven years ago, so if you want a deep-dive on the music and context, go read that. Today, just listen to it, and if it doesnt get you smiling and bopping, theres nothing I can say that will help you. Ill keep it brief: Shadows and Light is a fabulous live album. The band: Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Don Alias, Jaco Pastorius (!) , and Michael Brecker. That is a jaw-dropping list of names. The song? Its fast, its funny, and its a great tune.
SotD: Downpressor Man
In the earliest days, The Wailers were Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, and Peter Tosh. Peter was the guy in the band who was a foot taller than everyone else; also the only one who could play any instruments. A huge guy with a huge voice, his songs never in a hurry, and there are a few that people will be listening to centuries from now. For instance, Downpressor Man. This is from Equal Rights, a really remarkable recording that includes chestnuts like Get Up, Stand Up and Stepping Razor. Its just a big warm slow bath end-to-end; the words and politics are cutting but the sound is gentle and cradling.
SotD: Barretts Privateers
I suspect every Canadian of a certain age has heard this, probably on CBC or maybe sitting up late of a hazy evening. Its a sad boisterous story of ruin at sea, mens music written for mens voices, and youll never forget it once youve heard it even once. While Barretts Privateers initially sounds like an old folk tune, its nothing like that; it was written in 1976 by Stan Rogers, whose music I loved, and it really hurt when he died at age 33, yet another touring musician who went down with an airplane. Its got some bars in 5/4 time, hardly a folk standard, and its sort of historically bogus.
SotD: Gimme Sympathy
I think Im probably a big Metric fan even though Ive never actually sent any money their way, because whenever a song comes on the radio I find myself humming and smiling. Especially Gimme Sympathy. This is from Fantasies, released in 2009, which sure got a lot of radio play up here in Canada. Emily Haines has a fine, sweet, penetrating, voice, and major songwriting chops. Metric cuts right through the factory-produced schlock that mostly fills rock radio (and by the way always has, its just we forget the schlock of previous decades). I havent seen them play, but during the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver, there was a weird but excellent concert in which a bunch of musicians not including Neil Young but including Lou Reed and Elvis Costello put on an evening of Neil Young songs.
SotD: K.515
I believe its official name is Mozarts String Quintet No. 3 in C, but saying K then a number tells everyone that its by Mozart, and since he wrote like fifty instances of every known form of classical music, its easier to just remember your favorite K-numbers. 515 is right up there among mine; strong Mozart, which is all you need to know. By the way, if youre wondering about those K-numbers, Wikipedias Köchel catalogue article has you covered. The thing is that since Mozart was usually broke and trying to convince three different wealthy patrons that he was their exclusive guy, he wrote music like a crazed gerbil on steroids and didnt keep much in the way of records, so trying to organize his oeuvre has been the work of several other peoples lifetimes.
SotD: After Midnight
After midnight, its gonna be peaches and cream& mmmmm. This, originally by J.J. Cale, is one of the Twentieth Centurys sweetest little electric-music outings, gentle, sexy, and fast. Now, J.J. made a whole lot of money on this song when Eric Clapton decided to put it on a couple of albums and play it at a whole lot of concerts, and both versions are worth hearing. I saw J.J. play once stage-managed the show, in fact had to convince him to play an encore. Ive seen Clapton several times and while he might not the greatest guitarist to have ever lived, he never plays a song the same way twice.
SotD: Atomic
Oh& your hair is beautiful well, that lyric divides people. Ive read high-falutin rock critics slam its superficiality, embedded in a track that hardly has words anyhow, and certainly none that make sense. But you know, every time she sings that phrase, I melt. And love the whole song. Back in the day when the band had hits on the radio I liked every one of them, and when they didnt any more, I bought The Best of Blondie and man, Im not sure theres ever been a pop recording with more end-to-end concentrated excellence. I noticed when my kids were young, Id put it on and every time, theyd both start dancing right away.
SotD: Phase Dance
So back in the Seventies, if you were a college student and it was summer, youd sit around smoking weed and then someone would say Lets go to the record store. And in those days the people who worked there knew all the coolest music. So in the middle of the head-banger era, youd float into the record store and thered a fast brilliant jazz-guitar instrumental, and youd suddenly find youd become a fan of Pat Metheny. Phase Dance was that song on that summer day, from his debut Pat Metheny Group. Its not his masterpiece (more on that later) but its a fast bright shiny cheery piece of music with a nice bass-line and it moves right along and is never boring.
SotD: Love Me Like a Man
This was composed by Chris Smither (no, Id never heard of him either) but was a hit for, and is now sort of a trademark of, Bonnie Raitt. Bonnies recorded a lot of good music over the years, but the thing with her is you need to see her play live, its at another level entirely. Bonnie is a tuneful, convincing, loud blues singer (listen to Love Me Like a Man, for example), and is also a dazzling guitarist. In particular she has this gritty, textured slide-guitar tone that absolutely nobody else gets. This was brought home to me one time when I was at a concert and the opening act was led by her bands keyboard player, and they werent bad at all, funk and soul and energy.
SotD: Riding On The Rocket
Ive probably seen Shonen Knife (Wikipedia if you dont read Japanese) more than any other currently-performing rock band. When they get on stage you can count on a couple of hours of pure high-energy high-melody high-rhythm hard-rockin fun, and you just cant have too much of that. Riding the Rocket is just one of a couple of dozen totally great as-good-as-Rock-gets tunes. Naoko Just the facts: Shonen Knife were originally three young Japanese women from Osaka, two of them sisters. Theyve switched instruments and members and have, over the years, become a rotating planetary system around Naoko Yamano, who provides lead guitar and vocals and a lot of songwriting.
SotD: Ashes to Ashes
Its hard to pick a Bowie because, obviously, there were so many Bowies. One time my son and I, he then fifteen or so, were driving somewhere, and he asked me Dad, whos David Bowie? and I said A musician who& then I was stuck. For me, there are really two big Bowie songs, Heroes and Ashes to Ashes, and while the former has more emotion, I think Ashes has more musical depth. Oh, yes, and This Is Not America, but thats a niche taste. I believe the full title is Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). I remember my then-wife bringing home Scary Monsters; at the time I was in a jazz&blues phase and would never have bought a Bowie record, deeming him too synthetic.
SotD: Brothers in Arms
Dire Straits records have always been notably good-sounding, and Brothers in Arms became the occasion for the purchase of a brand-new CD player back in the day for many music geeks I was one of them. The title song sounds good too, but today were acknowledging its beauty and sadness and message. The beauty, superficially, is in the exquisite guitar obbligatos that come in after each sad verse. But theres more; while nobody would call Mark Knopfler one of the great singers, he really gives it all hes got on Brothers, suggesting notes that are way out of his reach, and just the right amounts of room in between, here and there.
SotD: Am I Blue?
Well, since yesterday I reached all the way back to the Nineteen Twenties for a show tune that went through many hands including Willie Nelsons, lets do it again today! Am I Blue was written by those big stars Harry Akst and Grant Clarke (Who? A couple of Tin Pan Alley types) in 1929 for the screen, and Wikipedia says its made it onto 42 different screens. Its a cool tune and up to the Song of the Day standard, but mostly here because I was charmed by video. The most famous, of course, would be the songs debut in On With the Show!, which reading about introduced me to the notion of Pre-Code movies; if the notion is new to you too, follow that link.
SotD: Blue Skies
From waaaay back in 1926, this one. What happened was, I wanted the series to drop by Willie Nelson, and my fave Willie album is Stardust, and song on it is Blue Skies. That whole album is salve for the wounded soul I think, and Blue Skies maybe the sweetest and strongest. But, boy, does this one ever have a history. Typing Blue Skies live into YouTube gets you into some surprising territory. Just so you dont have to, I listened to versions by Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Al Jolson, Earl Hines, and Ella Fitzgerald. I think the clear winners on musical merit are Ella and Willie.
SotD: Im a Man!
Wait& you say, thats two Steve Winwood songs in a row! Indeed. Only, this one is shorter and hotter. And anyhow, its a Spencer Davis Group song, so there. You have to feel a little sorry for Spencer, hell always be known as The Guy Who Had Steve In His Band. So, the world owes him one. This is the most primitive major-progression rave-up imaginable, which shouldnt be surprising since Winwood was still a teenager; he was 14 when the Davis band launched. And the lyrics, well, dont go there: Well, if I had my choice of matter I would rather be with cats / All engrossed in mental chatter showin where our minds are at is a high point.
SotD: The Low Spark
The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys was the album and the song, and its a song thatll never die. It was recorded by Traffic, written by Winwood/Capaldi, and last time I checked, Winwood still goes out on the road and plays it for people. Play it for yourself, but sit back and listen carefully, theres a lot happening. OK, John Barleycorn may be more coherent, but Low Spark is the Traffic album (and the song) for me. The melody is memorable, the singing is strong, and the piano foundation is dreamy, but for me its the sax line from Chris Wood that brings it home.
SotD: Wish I Knew You
Another Song of the Day that got here because its on the radio right now, and I smile every time they play it. The lyric in full says I wish I knew you when I was young. It resonates pretty deep for someone of my age. Of course, the guys in the band (The Revivalists) are young, but that doesnt seem to get in the way. This is the one, Im sure youve heard it recently: You shine like a star / You know who you are / You're everything beautiful& The Revivalists are a bunch of white boys from New Orleans; until I started poking around to write this piece I didnt realize they were a big complicated band with a horn section and a steel guitar, who stretch out in songs and go in surprising instrumental directions.
SotD: Cant Get There From Here
For a lot of bands, theres one song thats special because its the first one you heard on the radio and you thought Whos that?! I dont know if Cant Get There From Here is my absolute favorite R.E.M. song; Man on the Moon has great surge-and-flow, Losing My Religion is the greatest car singalong ever. But anyhow, its a fine piece of work. Side-note: The title of the song is inconsistent, sometimes appearing with the apostrophe, sometimes without. This was in the early eighties, I had a long commute to work and at that point there was a Vancouver radio station that played interesting new stuff, and I heard a lot of later-famous bands there before most people did.
SotD: Cello Suite #5
Today features the first artist to make a return Song-of-the-Day appearance: J.S. Bach. The music is the Cello Suite #5, a showpiece for basically every cellist whos ever performed, and an object of study for every serious student who gets a couple of years into the instrument. Cover page of the manuscript of the Suites by Anna Magdalena, Bachs second wife. The cello suites were written sometime around 1720; each has six parts, adding up to something over twenty minutes of music. So theyre long, and almost unbearably intense, so you dont usually hear them all at once, although Rostropovich apparently played them all night in 1989 at the fall of the Berlin Wall - theres a brief video.
Reviewing Ethics
I used to do quite a bit of reviewing on TripAdvisor; enjoyed the feeling of contributing and used the service when picking hotels and restos. But then I realized that this little warm glow was really all about making money for Silicon Valley VCs, and I have a major attitude problem about that. Which raises the issue; Is it ethically OK to participate in review sites at all? [Spoiler: Yeah, sometimes, but definitely not on Google Maps.] Now, as for TripAdvisor, turns out the original VCs got their exit in 2004 when IAC snapped up the site, then it was spun off as part of Expedia, then split with Expedia with an add-on IPO in 2011.
SotD: Mannish Boy
This eventually became Muddy Waters signature tune, which is sort of a pity because there were usually more interesting songs in his set, but he seemed to genuinely love it, and brought so much to each performance that you had to join in the love. I managed to see most of the big-name bluesman, mostly in a pretty elderly condition, but those are still highlights; I even interviewed Willie Dixon for the student paper; I seem to recall asking him what he thought about white college kids joining his audience and he looked at me like I was crazy; Blues is for everyone, man. I saw Muddy at the long-gone Ontario Place Forum in Toronto; he was really old and had to perform sitting down; then lurched out of his chair for Mannish Boy, busting some moves and hollering Im a MAN! ; it was so awesome.
SotD: Cream
This my fave Prince song, by a mile. I suspect that makes me a heretic, and is also wildly inconsistent because its got none of his guitar shredding on it, which almost makes me grin ear-to-era. But its a pure pop gem, a thing no song should ever apologize for in any company no matter how august. I am in no way a Prince-ologist. I never managed to catch a live show, but wouldnt have missed the chance. What else can I say? His Super Bowl half-time show was maybe the most intense ten minutes of music by anybody ever. To quote myself on the day: I get the feeling that Prince decided some heavy rain would help his visuals and he had so much mojo going into this particular Sunday that God took his call and set it up. I hated most of his slow-jam moaners, and the extra-stupid ...
SotD: Spinning Centers
This is from Unknown Rooms, a very beautiful collection by Chelsea Wolfe. Its a little unusual for this series in that its hardly a song all, just a floating, ethereal musical moment three minutes and nine seconds long. But you wont regret listening to it. The cover of Hiss Spun, her latest as of this writing. Im at risk of misrepresenting Ms Wolfe here; this may be floaty acoustic loveliness, but shes mostly a hard-edged electro-goth drone doomster. If you go to a show (which I recommend), expect a lot of dim lights and guitar roor. Having said that, the roaring dimness will have tons of musical integrity, just as the glowing light of Spinning Centers does.
SotD: Submission
Submission was a late addition to (most versions of) Never Mind the Bollocks, Heres the Sex Pistols, which anyone will tell you is Culturally Important. But mostly its just a really great rock song, which reveals that in among being Culturally Important, the Pistols were a highly competent and heavily rehearsed hard-rock band. Note: The picture above is inaccurate because Sid Vicious bass parts werent usable on Never Mind the Bollocks; the (pretty decent) bass youre hearing is by guitarist Steve Jones. Most people reading this are probably way too young to remember what a big deal the Sex Pistols were.
SotD: Walk Like an Egyptian
By The Bangles; OK, one of the most cheerful songs ever recorded, with a hilarious video. But its got a good beat, you could dance to it. And at 50° North Latitude where I live, well take any February smiles we can get. Seriously, listen to the song, watch the video, youll smile, how could that not be a good thing? Even better, stand up and do the dance around the office. What can I say? The band is tight, the vocals and harmonies are razor-sharp, the guitar sound is good. Playing this kind of music at this tempo is tough; they knew what they were doing.
SotD: Take Me To The River
You can call this one of the great songs in just about any musical conversation and youll get no argument. A great big swirl of the sacred and the sensual, with a razor rhythm and lots of chances to show off. It was written in 1974 by Al Green and guitarist Teenie Hodges for Al Green Explores Your Mind; it wasnt a hit, particularly, although a cover by Syl Johnson did OK. Then, four year later, the Talking Heads covered it on More Songs About Buildings and Food,, and that was a really big deal. The Heads had a following who liked their light-punk Manhattan sound, and this was a surprise.
SotD: Into the Dark
In full, I Will Follow You Into the Dark, by Death Cab for Cutie off their album Plans. This is a solo acoustic thing, stripped down to nothing but a lovely tune and a haunting message; both will stick to you, even if you heard them a million times on the radio a decade back. No personal connection here; I dont know anything about Death Cab, think its a dumb name for a band, dont know any of their other songs, wouldnt recognize any of them if I met them on the street. I just heard it on the radio driving a kid to school, and was hooked: If heaven and hell decide that both are satisfied/Illuminate the Nos on their Vacancy signs. Ive never been in a close-up-with-death situation, but it feels like the singers captured that feeling.
SotD: Do You Love Me?
Normally I write Song of the Day a few days ahead, and today I woke up on Valentines day and realized that days song was symphonic stuff by Brahms, which is great but not perhaps the Language Of Love. To make up for that, Ill send you all along a Happy Valentines for a few days back with a song thats about nothing but love, by Nick Cave. Nicks released a lot of good music over the years; this is off (sticking with the V-Day theme) Let Love In. It might be the album highlight but there are other gems too.
SotD: Fine and Mellow
This is a song not only performed but written by Billie Holiday; it was a hit in 1939, the flip side of the beautiful but gruesome Strange Fruit (the fruit was a lynching victim). Fine and Mellow is sad too, but a fairly standard man-treats-me-bad blues. Its a treat for the ears and the heart. You cant write about Billie without dipping into cliché: Victimized as a black and as a woman, drank herself to death, endless sadness in that story. Im actually not a devotee, quite a bit of her music goes bye me. But others, like this one, grab hard and dont let go.
SotD: Death Dont Have No Mercy
Death Dont Have No Mercy is a very old, very dark blues by Rev. Gary Davis which has been covered lots, by Dylan and the Dead among others. But today Im plugging a live version recorded by Hot Tuna in 1992. Hot Tuna are a very rootsy outfit. For those who dont know, they were the Jeffersan Airplane faction that didnt go Starshipping; guitarist/singer Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady. They play blues and country and swing stuff, with a lot of extended guitar/bass breaks, always sitting down. This is on a live album called Live At Sweetwater Two, and I saw them play more or less this set a few months before they recorded it.
SotD: Ashes the Rain and I
The James Gang was a stripped-down band that mostly played primitive rock and roll (which I love) very well, and Rides Again is an example of that, but Ashes the Rain and I isnt primitive at all; five minutes of contemplative beauty. Disclosure: Joe Walsh has been, and remains, one of my musical heroes; a guy with a reputation for dumb stuff who really doesnt seem to be dumb at all. Plus, his guitar tone is second to, well none might be taking it a bit high, but it sure sounds great. If I keep doing this, hell get a rocker into Song of the Day.
SotD: Brahms Variations
Today, lets do classical music, as in a great big splodge of orchestral goo by a dead German. Brahms op. 56a and 56b is a set of variations on a theme; he thought the theme was Haydns, thus called it Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn. But now they think the Haydn attribution on the theme is sketchy, so now youll see em labeled sometimes as the Saint Anthony Variations. Anyhow, this is a super tasty splodge of goo, the kind of thing orchestras exist to play. Brahms, the year before the Variations were published. Brahms early career was up and down; he was in his late thirties before he got much traction.
SotD: Jah Glory
Third World have always had had a different sound, leaning quite a bit on sweet harmonies and instrumental flavors. Its reggae all right, but impure like most great music, and sounds as tasty as anything you can imagine. Jah Glory is such a sweet welcoming thing, a soaring song of worship. (You dont have to believe in Jah.) I saw Third World once in Toronto, I think part of the big Caribana festival, in a soccer stadium. The concert promoter had really screwed the pooch; the stage was one side of the field and when we filed in we found ourselves bottled up in the stands on the other side of the field, with the grass fenced off and a handful of cops lined up between the stands and the field.
SotD: Dear Darling
Mary Margaret OHara, a daughter of Toronto, hasnt recorded much and hasnt had hits and these are terribly sad things because shes a gem, a wonderful unconventional songwriter and singer. Her stuff gets pretty far out over the edge sometimes, but Dear Darling is a lovely straight-up country tune, hardly weird at all, or only in places. Ms OHaras performances were legendary in Toronto of the Eighties, and when she finally went into the studio and came out with Miss America, people thought she was on a rocket to the Top of the Pops. Despite, one hears, a parade of record-company executives throwing themselves at her feet, shes only ever recorded once since then, on the soundtrack to the 2001 move Apartment Hunting.
SotD: Mercy Street
Nobody could call this obscure; Peter Gabriels So sold a kazillion copies and was right in the center of the zeitgeist for months back in the late Eighties. The songs were good, the sound was good, and (especially) the videos were good, which really mattered in 1986. Mercy Street was not one of its big hits, which always astonished me; I thought it by far and away the albums highlight. So isnt innovative or groundbreaking or anything; the song structures are conventional and the melodies are unfussy. The production quite properly focuses on Gabriels vocals, which on this record are outstanding in their artistry and just the sound of his voice, a pleasantly-rough English tenor, mostly singing in the comfortable center of his range.
Photo Antiphony
Mobile-phone cameras are better this year than last, and next year theyll be better again. The notion of carrying around a heavy chunk of metal and glass called a camera is becoming difficult to defend and this makes me sad, because I like cameras. Using the big fat Samyang 135mm F2 is giving me strong opinions about what a camera has to be to become the anti-phone, the one youll take along even though theres a good camera on your phone. This piece contains 7½ pictures, 1½ of which could have been captured with a mobile camera, and one of which was.
SotD: Fantaisie Impromptu
After the hot guitar a couple days back, I thought some more flashy soloing would be fun, and the world currently has nobody flashier, on any instrument, than pianist Yundi Li, who seems to have rebranded himself as YUNDI. But I ended up at this Frédéric Chopin Fantaisie which has, yes, flash, but lots of music among and between it, and Mr Li really seems to understand Mr Chopin. If hes coming to your town, I recommend grabbing tickets; hes obviously a really good pianist but also a showman. One of his gimmicks, which I really like, is that when its time for him to play, he strides onto the stage, plunks down on the piano bench, and his fingers hit the keyboard about 0.5 seconds later.
SotD: Broken English
This the title track from Broken English, an album by Marianne Faithfull, on which every song is good and some are terrifying (not this one). I was sufficiently impressed by the album that I wrote a whole blog piece on it a few years back. Like I said there, Ms Faithfull has a lot of history and a lot of baggage; all worth reading about, and there are lots of places to do that that arent this blog. In 2009. No longer a goddess nor a burnout, just a grown-up. Whats interesting about Broken English is that its from well into her career, with a lot of glory and wreckage in the rear-view.
SotD: Pride and Joy
Its been mostly gentle and sophisticated around here recently. Lets turn to Texas and fix that; Pride and Joy, by Stevie Ray Vaughan, is about the simplest blues holler you can imagine, with a happy message and some smokin hot guitar. Wow, Stevie Ray has been dead for 28 years. The last time I saw him feels like yesterday; it was just weeks before his death. Stevie Ray had managed to achieve sobriety after a lot of years of hard partying; like many sober addicts, hed gotten to the point where the alternative was a coffin. Anyhow, that night when I saw him, he made a touching little speech about being sober, and how you had to take of yourself to be there for the people you love.
SotD: Sodade
Cesária Évora is probably the only person youve ever heard of (now that youve heard of her) from Cabo Verde, which is an island group 570km west of Africas westernmost point. She was a really great singer and recorded lots of fine collections of music. Its hard to pick from among them, but Sodade is a fine example. I dont know much about Ms Évora or about Cabo Verde either. Miss Perfumado, from which Sodade comes, is probably her best-known work. All of the songs on it are good, and in fact everything Ive hear from her is pleasing to the ear.
SotD: Both Sides Now
Anyones list of top songwriters would include Joni Mitchell, and any list of her top songs would include Both Sides, Now. Theres little I can say that will add value here, just give it a listen and itll improve your day, any day. Notes It was recorded by Judy Collins first, not Ms Mitchell. Speaking of recorded-by , check the list of cover versions, helpfully organized by decade; oh my goodness gracious. I can remember once when I was stage manager for a concert, during the endless hours of take-down, load-out, and clean-up, someone put a tape on the auditorium PA that had a cover by a warm-voiced male singer, and since it was only a half-hour tape I heard it like six times, and to this day it remains the voice I hear when I think of the song.
SotD: Joan of Arc
This is a song by Leonard Cohen, but Im talking about it as performed by Jennifer Warnes. It may not even be Warnes best cover of a Cohen tune, but its good enough to be any days song, and the recording is special. Many years ago, Jennifer Warnes released Famous Blue Raincoat, a collection of Cohen songs, and did very well by it. Its a fantastic record; Warnes inhabits Cohens tunes completely. Which is a neat trick, since shes got a big, creamy voice as wide as a river and smooth as satin, while Cohens voice is exactly none of those things.
SotD: Diaraby
Todays song comes from Africa (first in the series); Diaraby is a slow dreamy electric African blues with exquisite singing and guitar, by Ali Farka Touré; seven minutes of pure musical joy. Lets start our trip to Africa in Mali, famous among other things for being the location of Timbuktu; and for its music. In 1994 Ry Cooder and Malian musical godfather Farka Touré collaborated on Talking Timbuktu, which includes Diaraby and is one of my very favorite recordings. Its a cant-miss record, cheerful yet deep, bluesy and African, especially appropriate for sitting outside on a warm day. I read the back story once of how Mr Farka Touré got into playing music that sounded simultaneously like John Lee Hooker and African campfire music, but I cant remember it.
SotD: Happy
The song-of-the-day recently has been trending a little bit to the eclectic and the obscure. Enough of that, lets dish up a hearty serving of meat-and-potatoes rock-n-roll. Happy is a simple stripped-down hard Stones rocker, vocals by Keef, with a nice tune, tasty chord changes, and you know what? I need a love to keep me happy too. You have to be a little nervous plugging the Stones in the era of #MeToo; their work includes dark splashes of shocking misogyny. But Exile on Main Street has less (cant actually pull any to the front of my mind), so well cut them some slack.
First Purples
Its a tradition that I blog a photo of our crocuses the first time each year that Im home and theyre open and theres some light. In the Pacific Northwests late winter, we use some light in a forgiving kind of way. The big-ass new 135mm F2 lens was quivering in the camera bag for a chance at these little guys, how could I say no? The lens works well, but when I say works I mean the photographer does a whole lot of work to get the focus happening. It took really a lot of shots to come away with three that were usefully sharp.
SotD: Ne Nehledej
Im pretty sure Ne Nehledej, which is said to mean Stop Searching , is in the Czech language, because Iva Bittová is Czech. I dont know that much about her and frankly this Song of the Day mostly exists to highlight remarkable video, but Ne Nehledej is a nice song and Bittová is a great entertainer while also being out there on the edge. She sings and plays violin, and is as much performance art as music. But (unlike some performance artists) this performance is all about music. Its a bit confusing, because this song appears on Bittovás eponymous first album from 1986, but then theres another 1994 album with that title, which in that listing is translated as No, Do Not Seek .
SotD: More White Flags
Yesterdays White Flag isnt the only song of that name. I want to share one in particular, a minor hit by a minor band ( one-hit wonder would be charitable) called the Leggatt Brothers, because I think its brilliant, a forgotten gem. But theres no live video and its not for sale digitally, so I loaded up the entry with a few extra White Flags. First, we have Joseph, a band featuring three sisters whose surnames are Schepman and Closner (I can see why they didnt use either), singing burn the white flag; not bad! Second, some guy named Dave Barnes; didnt get far into this one, but hey, you might love it.
SotD: White Flag
Here we have a sweet sad love song by Dido (full name Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong) who was born in 1971 and is thus younger than many other Songs of the Day. It was a huge hit, hardly obscure (the album Life For Rent sold 10+ million copies). Its OK to be mainstream sometimes, and White Flag is more than OK, its brilliant. An Australian story A dozen years ago we went on a camping trip to the southeast corner of Australia with a dozen or more people, including a few kids. One evening, the little ones were asleep and we were sitting around the fire enjoying a few well-earned drinks when the partys three pre-teen girls wandered in out of the dark and said theyd been working on a song.
SotD: If I Had a Rocket Launcher
Bruce Cockburn is sufficiently Canadian that his name may ring no bells. But I think If I Had a Rocket Launcher made a few waves back in the day and may jog a memory. Hes an interesting guy, and this is a nice, lilting melodic song about wanting to kill people. Cockburn (rhymes with flow-burn ) is Christian, political, a dazzling (mostly acoustic) guitarist, and a decent singer and songwriter, with a pleasing throaty baritone. Hes been doing it for a long time; when I was the part-time University stage manager forty years ago, I put him on several times, and every show was a highlight.
SotD: Canones Diversi
Almost a month in, and we havent had a visit with J.S. Bach yet. Long past time, and well be back a lot too, if this series stretches out much. Were going to start out with minimal Bach; well get around to thunderous Bach, passionate Bach, and show-off Bach in later installments. Today well sample from a small series entitled Canones diversi super Thema Regium, part of a larger work called Musikalisches Opfer, or in English The Musical Offering, composed in 1747, BWV 1079. Today well take on the Canon a 2, per augmentationem, contrario motu and the Fuga canonica in Epidiapente.
SotD: Slavery Days
I sure do love me some reggae; my island-music tastes are mainstream, but once you get past Marley, the names are fading from memories. Maybe I can reverse that a bit. Lets start with Winston Rodney; his first band was Burning Spear, then he just adopted the name for himself. His music is a little deeper, his singing a little edgier, his horn arrangements excellent. Slavery Days has all of those things, and deserves to live forever. When you consider Mr Rodney, you have to take Rastafari (the religion, I mean) into account; hes serious about it. Its a strong flavor in a culture that produced a whole lot of really good music.
SotD: Beck + Call
I run a lot of old music but Im not someone who really thinks it was all better back in the day, or is all trash now. So from time to time, the Song of the Day is going to be something I liked on the car radio while I was driving around today. Today, its Beck + Call by July Talk. Who knows if itll still have listeners decades from now like most of the selections here, or even centuries like some. Who cares? Its a nice tune, neednt hang its head in the current company, and July Talk are hot stuff live.
SotD: Habanera
The full title is Lamour est un oiseau rebelle ( Loves a rebel bird ), a big soprano aria from Carmen, written by Georges Bizet in 1875. Thats right, an opera! Were into scary territory here, at risk of chasing away followers of this quixotic New Years Resolution. But bear with me, its quite a song. No, Im not really an opera fan. It has problems: pretentiousness, a lot of the music is lame, it encourages a hard vibrato-heavy voice that usually repels me, the male singers bellow, and they care way too much about the costumes. But, I go see them sometimes; Lauren and I subscribed to the Vancouver Opera for a few years, and really enjoyed it.
SotD: I Thank You
Mr Moore and Mr Prater dropped their last names and were big soul stars as Sam & Dave between 1961 and 1981. That kind of music has been pretty far off the charts for a lot of years, although they got some help from the Blues Brothers. Theyve got two or three performances that belong in this series. I think that I Thank You was the first ever soul song that penetrated my consciousness, and is maybe still my favorite. It feels somehow wrong to write about Sam & Dave recordings, because their live performances were essential. They were seriously cool dancers and had the best horn-section orchestration I ever saw.
SotD: The Heart of the Sun
In full, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun by (the very early) Pink Floyd. While Floyd written some beautiful music, if you want something thats new to, well, anyone, you pretty well have to go way back in time to before Dark Side of the Moon. Set the Controls is an easy, pleasing, soaring listen, with or without the help of hallucinogenic drugs. The album version of Set the Controls is unique in that it has input from all five Floyds, notably featuring guitar from both David Gilmour and Syd Barrett. Thats on Floyds second album, Saucerful of Secrets, but I hardly know it because Im a huge fan of the live take on Ummagumma; not surprising since I like live recordings generally.
SotD: Visions of You
Jah Wobble grew up in East London with the Sex-Pistols-to-be, and his handle comes from a drunken Sid Vicious attempting to pronounce his real name (John Wardle). He joined John Lydons post-Pistols Public Image Limited and then formed Invaders of the Heart. Visions of You is the lead-off track on the Invaders Rising Above Bedlam disk, which I often play end-to-end. Its a lightweight pop song with an icy slow-funk background, a real treat for the ears. Wobble is a talented, dub-influenced bass player, and any time youre listening to his music, you want to deploy the biggest speakers you have access to, ideally connected to a whole lot of amplifier wattage.
SotD: Lust For Life
I suppose that in 2018 Lust For Life is an obscurity, something you might have heard on the radio or in an ad. Thats insane, its obviously one of the great rock songs of all time, and has given Iggy Pop, who co-wrote it with David Bowie, a performance vehicle that hes taken a long, long way. Im a hopeless fan of Iggy Pop. Hes a hardass rocker who never for even one on-stage instant is giving less than 100%. And a fine singer, always in tune. And, go read a few interviews; Iggy is an articulate, well-informed, pleasant dude, not at all full of himself.
SotD: Cry Me a River
Occasionally, the Song of the Day idea starts with a Greatest-Hits record that has multiple candidates, and I pick based on which turns up the best live video. Todays Greatest Hits are those of Julie London, and it was a tough choice, but what a beautiful piece of singing Cry Me a River is. It was tough because Julie, in my opinion, also owns the best-ever recordings of A Taste of Honey (the Beatles version pretty well sucks, while Martin Denny and Herb Alpert are only pretty good) and also of Light My Fire (the Doors version doesnt suck, but Julie brings a hundred times as much sex which in popular music trumps great instrumental breaks.
SotD: Israelites
The summer I turned fourteen, Israelites by Desmond Dekker and the Aces was the biggest hit in the world. I thought it was the best song of that summer and maybe the next summer too. Id go to the beach, where everyone had a radio, and as you walked along youd hear Israelites coming at you in super-stereo from a dozen directions; it sounded so great. So, what is it about this song? Maybe the razor-sharp proto-reggae beat, maybe Desmonds virtuoso singing, so deep in the beat hes a rhythm instrument, could be the cool baritone harmonies, or just maybe its a really great tune.
Samyang 135mm F2
What happened was, I stumbled across Why you should own a 135mm F2 lens in DPReview (another Amazon property, hmmm) and boy was it ever convincing, so I clicked over (to Amazon, natch) and picked up the Fujifilm X-mount version. DPReviews piece opens with: Image quality, weight and value for money. Well, two out of three aint bad. Its actually hard to find the lenss home page behind the barrage of reviews and retailers, but I managed. And if youre another click-through-to-Amazon type, here ya go. You gotta respect Samyang for shipping all those mount options: Canon, Canon M, Nikon, Pentax, Sony , Sony E, Fujifilm X, Samsung NX, µ4/3.
SotD: Travelin Prayer
In the mid-Seventies, a women we found with a classified ad moved into my student house, and of course brought her record collection. It included something called Cold Spring Harbor by a guy Id never heard of, Billy Joel. We were pretty well a heavy-music joint that didnt listen to fluff without guitar solos, so Billy got no respect then, just like he gets no respect now. But, in among the cheesy ballads there was this song that got way under my skin, and still does: Travelin Prayer. Its great, pretty well flawless. The problem with Billy I earned my living most of my way through university by stage-managing the rock shows the student council put on, and then eventually the classicoids and jazzbos the University booked.
SotD: No Woman, No Cry
Bob Marleys been gone a long time; longer than most people reading this have lived, I bet. But more than most deceased musicians, it feels to me like hes still out there; a quiet dub track woven into the universal quantum background hum. Try to prove me wrong. No Woman, No Cry is a good first entry for reggae in Song of the Day; Warm-sounding warm-heartedness; what could be better in a Northern-hemisphere winter? Reggae, its got this dark sweet warm pulse like molasses for the brain, but its not simple at all. I saw a documentary once about Marley and the Wailers breaking into mainstream music.
SotD: Pärts Cantus
Since Ive been rocking the house the last couple of days, lets do serenity instead. Specifically, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, for string orchestra and bell, by Arvo Pärt, one of my musical heroes. Heres how good this is: It just about got me killed, the first time I heard it. Which was on a rented cars radio in England, heading up the M3, where they drive fast; I was jet-lagged and I caught myself closing my eyes at 85mph to savor the fading tones of the church bell. Arvo Pärt is an Estonian, elderly but still active. He Believes In God, big-time, and knowing this may help you enjoy his music.
SotD: Clampdown
Yesterday, I used the phrase best Rock song ever recorded . Well, why not two days in a row? Because another fine candidate is Clampdown from the Clashs wonderful London Calling album. That record was a highlight of 1980 and Clampdown was a highlight of the record. I think a listen is in order now in 2018 if only for the lyric In these days of evil presidentes& need I say more? Great tune, strong words, hot playing, fine production. People hear that loud raw sound and might foolishly think that its easy to play. Clampdown, like a lot of their songs, is fast, and keeping that kind of thing together at that speed, particular with the lousy on-stage sound most rock bands have had to deal with, is a big deal.
SotD: Day Tripper
If someone asked me what the greatest rock&roll song of all time was, I wouldnt be able to pick. But if they kept asking, and you got a serious conversation going, Day Tripper would be in that conversation. Yes, I acknowledge that this is two loud-and-fast-BritPop Songs of the Day in a row. Its worth noting that Day Tripper is musically weird; to start with, theres a slow backbeat behind the fast rhythms. The chords veer from major into minor and back. And if you talk to people who really care about this kind of stuff youre apt to hear a lot of Wow& that tambourine! (Ringo BTW).
Google Memory Loss
I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Googles competition is doing better. Evidence This isnt just a proof, its a rock-n-roll proof. Back in 2006, I published a review of Lou Reeds Rock n Roll Animal album. Back in 2008, Brent Simmons published That New Sound, about The Clashs London Calling. Heres a challenge: Can you find either of these with Google? Even if you read them first and can carefully conjure up exact-match strings, and then use the site: prefix? I cant. Why? Obviously, indexing the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day.
SotD: Missionary Man
If I actually had any serious musical talent, I would have chosen rock&roll over all other professions. I guess I havent been running that many pure simple rock songs here, and thats wrong. So lets turn todays space over to Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart, and Joniece Jamison of the Eurythmics for some nice polished passionate BritRock. Since theres not really much to say about Missionary Man, let me pass on a little bit of Rock and Roll Theory, which most of you will know, but for those who dont: What is Rock&Roll anyhow? Three ingredients: 1) Blues chord changes, 2) electric guitars, and 3) a backbeat.
SotD: Gravitys Angel
Possibly you havent encountered Laurie Anderson, and possibly if you did you wouldnt like her, because shes pretty far out there. Gravitys Angel is at the near end of out-there, a simple-ish song with a lovely tune and a cool arrangement; a good place to start. What happened was, in the mid-Eighties Id heard O Superman on campus radio and then Laurie was coming to town and a couple of people whose judgment I respected said You really have to go see her so I did, never having bought a record, no idea what I was getting into. It was easily one of the top two or three musical experiences of my life; I got giddy in the middle of one of the songs because Id been holding my breath, because you had to.
SotD: Please Dont
I mean Baby, Please Dont Go of course, the blues chestnut to end all blues chestnuts. Nobody knows who wrote it, although apparently Muddy Waters first made it a hit; Wikipedia offers several plausible backgrounds dating from slavery days up to about 1925. The version Im chiefly recommending was recorded by Lightnin Hopkins in the early Sixties. That recording is on a collection called Prestige Profiles Lightnin Hopkins, its really pleasing. The audio is brilliant in that they apparently pointed a couple of good mikes at the musician and got out of the fucking way, an approach now unknown to the music business.
SotD: The Other 5:15
No, Im not talking about the Who song from Quadrophenia (though its a fine tune), Im talking about the song by Chris Isaak. No, Im not talking about Wicked Game either, which I may feature here some day. Im talking about Chris 5:15, one of the several excellent songs on San Francisco Days, one of the several excellent albums Mr Isaak has released. Chris even had a TV show for a while, which was funny and, because Chris is funny, generally a good entertainer. Chris plays an enjoyable guitar, with a big relaxed slow twang, but hes mostly about the songwriting, and singing with one of the truly golden voices.
SotD: Troy
I bought Sinéad OConnors debut, The Lion and the Cobra, because Mandinko was on the radio and I liked it. The first time I played it, not having looked at the track listing, I noticed some meditative crooning about Dublin in a Rainstorm ; the next time, a gut-grabbing throaty chant: You should have left the lights on ; and then another time a howling declaration about rising, a phoenix from the flame. It took me a while to notice that all of these were from the same track: Troy. Its a hell of a song. Its a hell of an album too; other highlights are Never Get Old and A Drink Before the War, which inspired me to a grief-stricken piece on the eve of the Iraq war.
SotD: Temporary Ground
This is the best song from Jack Whites 2014 Lazaretto album, and it was the centerpiece of the show last time I saw him play. Its mostly acoustic, thus has to stand on its own sans bombastic guitar flourishes. Dont get me wrong, I like Jacks bombastics, but its good to let a song speak for itself, and Temporary Ground has a lot to say. Gosh, I do seem to write about Jack White a lot; in particular about his recent recordings and a recent concert. Heres why: He shares a lot of my ideas about how songs should be written, how rock&roll ought to be played, and how to record it.
SotD: Voodoo Runner
Todays song is Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, from Bitches Brew. In the series intro I said I wont be recommending abrasive free-jazz jams& and well, this is kind of abrasive and while it might not be free jazz, its pretty loose. But its wonderful improvisation and production, full of deep musical intelligence, and if you like anything at all in the electric-jazz space, youll probably like this a lot. If youve never checked the space out, this might be a good place to start. I am not gonna invest the ten thousand or so words it would take to even summarize Miles labyrinthine path through the genres, even the ones he invented himself, and explain where Bitches Brew fits in.
SotD: Solveigs Song
Hey, there are songs in Classical Music, too! Maybe you think you dont like that stuff? Stick around and give this one a listen. This Song is the last movement of Peer Gynt Suite #2 by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, dating from 1876. Its exceptionally beautiful, one of the great melodies of all time. I encountered it some decades ago, when my cello teacher assigned it to me, and it works well on that instrument. I loved playing it and now I love listening to it. It turns out there are a lot of ways to perform this; while I mentioned cello, its often played as a piece for orchestra; the version I happen to have is from a 1989 Karajan/BPO outing and its lovely, but Im not going to claim that its definitive, Ive seen rave reviews of Beechams 1957 (!)
SotD: Petes Blue
This is a minimalist guitar instrumental by Roy Buchanan (1939-1988). Genuinely obscure stuff, but Im pretty sure youll find it worth seven minutes and seventeen seconds of your time. Back in the day, Roy had a real following among electric-guitar devotees, including the Rolling Stones, who offered him a spot when they lost Brian Jones; he passed. I wasnt a huge fan, finding his playing often overwrought and overdecorated. But the B side of his debut album went straight to my heart; Petes Blue is the highlight. I still put that scratchy 45-year-old vinyl on sometimes, and smile every time. Nice-looking album cover, too.
SotD: Cannonball
Music comes in lots of flavors, most of which Id hate to have to live without, but the ones closest to my heart involve well-played electric guitars, female voices, and raw rock energy. The Breeders Cannonball has all three ingredients. Unlike many of the daysongs, this one has no personal back-story at all; Until I started writing this I had no idea who The Breeders are/were, I just liked this tune a whole lot when it came on the twentieth-century radio, and still do. Hm, it turns out they have roots in the Pixies and Throwing Muses and have been on-and-off over the years but are apparently still on.
SotD: Ooh La La
This by The Ditty Bops, from their self-titled debut album in 2004. Id never heard of them before, nor have I since; but this is a remarkable song and more than one friend, hearing it in the background, has stopped talking and asked Whats that? The Ditty Bops are a female duet with (on this album) tight harmonies, tuneful tunes with singing that is athletic and graceful. They sound very young. Ooh La La is fast and tight and a torrent of words hurtles by: Was it the fighting was it the fist / Was it adventure with a jealous twist / Was it desire for another's kiss / What brought the house down?
SotD: Identikit
This is from Radioheads recent A Moon Shaped Pool, which Ive been listening to a whole lot, and oh my goodness what a beautiful song. I came to Radiohead late, missed them completely on the way up. For years all I knew was they were the band behind the OK Computer hits on the radio, but I guess Im a fan now. I like pretty well all of Moon Shaped Pool, and its an absolute production triumph, the kind of thing I put on when people ask why I still have a big hulking old-school audiophile system down at that end of the room.
SotD: Western Stars
Nobody, and I mean nobody, brings more to a performance than k.d. lang. But shes not on the road that much, so you might have to settle for recordings. A good recording to settle for would be Shadowland, featuring production by country-music legend Owen Bradley and guest appearances by other divas-with-twang. This is probably the best song on Shadowland. This is part of the Song of the Day series (background). I actually saw k.d. last year, on her Ingenue tour, in which she played that breakthrough album end-to-end, then a bunch of hits. The place was packed, mostly with the gay and/or grey-haired.
SotD: New Years Day
Back in the late Eighties, for a few months I went to aerobics class, and once every session the instructor put this U2 chestnut on and every time my beats-per-minute cranked right up. Not in the slightest obscure, but worth revisiting at least once a year, ideally on this day. U2 are pretty well dinosaurs now, but then I am too. And when they stomped the earth in the late Eighties, it shook. They brought a whole lot of musical intensity to the stage, and the best live bass sound Ive ever heard. And passion: I recall a hot summer night back, then an outdoor show; Bonos arm was in bandages and a sling because hed fallen off the stage a few nights earlier.
Happy New Year!
Best of 2018 to you. But this isnt a real blog post, its a placeholder to debug a subtle Unicode bug in my comment system that doesnt appear on my staging environment. *sigh*
Songs of the Day
Heres my New Years Resolution: Ill try to try to publish a short piece every day recommending a song that I think is excellent, and apt to please at least some readers. Lets see how far into 2018 I get; a quick run through the collection turned up around 240 candidates, so a whole years worth of songs would be a stretch goal. Read on for motivation, logistics, and mechanics. Or just read the song notes, starting tomorrow. Or dont. Why? 2018 will be this blogs fifteenth year, and the fragments dont flow as fast as they used to; I have to reach back pretty far sometimes to achieve even three or four microessays a month.
Moving Mobile Windows
A large proportion of the information I consume on my mobile comes from two apps: The Economist (iOS, Android), and a whole lot of feeds via Feedly (iOS, Android). They both present text in narrow columns and share a lovely, simple navigation metaphor which unfortunately has recently broken (on Android at least). In both cases, each story is presented in a single column that fills the screen from left to right and extends arbitrarily far down, as long as need be for the pieces body. The stories are side by side. There are only two ways to navigate: Up or down the columns, and right or left between stories.
How To Sell Bitcoins
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back. Then I forgot about them, Bitcoins price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could be turned into real actual money, and it turned out they could. Heres how. Important note: This narrative applies specifically to exchanging BTC for Canadian dollars, in Canada. Some lessons may apply in other jurisdictions. How I did it There are a lot of people out there on the Net who are eager to sell you Bitcoins, but when you want to sell them back for hard cold cash, the offerings seem to thin out.
The Last JSON Spec
The IETF just published RFC 8259 (also known as STD 90 ). Editor, yr humble servant. The legacy-ASCII full text is here and Ill link a nice-looking HTML version from here sometime in the next day or two. I think this is the last specification of JSON that anyone will ever publish. The story of how we got to RFC 7159, this RFCs predecessor, is told in JSON Redux AKA RFC7159 and I wont re-tell it. The reason 8259 exists is that the ECMAScript gang went and wrote their own extremely minimal spec, Standard ECMA-404: The JSON Data Interchange Syntax, and there was reason for concern over dueling standards.
Dark Vegas
I spent four nights in Las Vegas while at re:Invent. The citys daytime aspect is kind of flat and low-contrast because who cares what it looks like then? Photographers there come out like vampires after dark. I took along the ludicrous Achromat lens for the sparklies, so got em if ya want em. Also hotel, music, and venue recommendations you wont want to miss. Lets start with the sparklies. That lens sure is fun. Not to mention the effect when you tell your table-mates you brought along your Las Vegas Lens and pull a whole lot of tubular gleaming brass out of your bag.
Unapocalyptic Software
The Atlantic published The Coming Software Apocalypse by James Somers, which is full of dire warnings and strong claims. Heres one: Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little. My first programming job was in 1979, I still construct software, and I can testify that that assertion is deeply wrong, as is much else in the piece. I would very much like to place an alternative view of my profession before the people who have consumed Mr Somers, but I wouldnt know how, so Ill just post it here; maybe an Atlantic reader or two will stumble across it.
Do You Love Any Dead People?
I think most of us do, so if youre in Vancouver around Halloween, you should go visit A Night For All Souls. Even if everyone you love is still alive, you should go anyhow because its full of extreme ethereal dark-hued beauty. All Souls is in Vancouvers Mountain View Cemetary, where Ive often taken pictures and played Ingress before; its central and, yes, has a terrific view of the mountains. The project is city-funded and I hope they go on funding it. The concept is simple: After dark there are soft lights everywhere, many of them in little shrines you can visit and write a message or light a candle.
Dueling Camera Apps
I got a Pixel 2, largely because its said to have a really great camera, with software-driven magic machine learning at work. Here are two shot comparisons between the Google and Lightroom Android camera apps to see what that means in practice. Why Lightroom? Given a choice, I prefer the Lightroom app to Androids. It has better, more intuitive ergonomics, including a level; makes the phone feel more like a camera. Also, you can edit in the Android version of Lightroom, which has basically the same controls as the desktop version I live in. Also, it shoots and edits DNG RAW files.
Vintage Nauticals
We keep our boat at Horseshoe Bay, a pretty little place when approached by land. Boaters coming in from Howe Sound come face-to-face with a huge antique float/pier/breakwater kind of thing, whose ugliness Ive long found magnificent and which today I took the time to tour and photograph. Turns out this huge steel thing is afloat, actually; heres how its fastened to the land. Those are big chains and huge truck tires. What happened was, I was out winterizing the boat. Vancouver missed autumn this year, snapped over from 18°C Indian-summer to basically zero more or less overnight. Today a few snowflakes drifted down and I was wearing a nontraditional Canadian boating toque.
Working at Amazon
Sometimes when were trying to hire a senior employee, I get asked to do a sell call , tell them what its like to work here. Since Im coming up on three years and havent quit, I guess the supposition is that Ill be positive. Since these candidates are outsiders and some of them dont come to work for us, nothing I can say can be a secret. So why dont I tell everyone? Before I dive in any further, everything here relates to AWS, not Amazon as a whole. It might be true of the retail side too, but I dont know because I dont work there.
Live Metal is Better
Recently I went out for a live metal triple-bill, with Endon and SUMAC opening for Boris, whom Ive covered here before (with groovy pix). More pix today, with words on the history and meaning of metal, and how to photograph it. Endon, the openers, are described as catastrophic noise metal and yeah, they were pretty catastrophic. A little too abstract for me, but sincere and really trying to bring it. Didnt get any pix. Heres my problem: I wholeheartedly love this music, in particular live, and yet I have to acknowledge that its sort of, well, ridiculous. The volume is much louder than can be sanely necessary.
Macro Trends
In The bubble without any fizz, The Economist addresses the fact that financial-asset prices (stocks, bonds, and the like) keep drifting up and up in a world where inflation doesnt; are we in a mega-bubble? Whats really going on? Looks obvious to me, but then Im a left-winger. I think its all a straightforward consequence of economic efficiency and class warfare. Inflation? It stays low because our globalized economy is hyperefficient at making the things we want, extracting the fuels we burn, and growing the food we eat. And also flexible enough that it can scale up and down to meet demand without apparently kicking off waves of inflation or bankruptcy.
Refresh Is Sacred
There are two kinds of client applications: The first kind has a refresh or reload button to make sure your apps in sync with its servers view of the world. The second kind is broken. Of late, I have to deal regularly with several apps, notably including an emailer and a car-sharing service, that lack such a button. I can imagine why a customer-focused product manager said Steve Jobs taught us that fewer controls are better and we should just take care of making sure were in sync with the cloud. So lose the button. Except for, it doesnt work. Apparently nobody in the world is smart enough to arrange for flawlessly reliable hands-off client/cloud synchronization.
You Might Be Evil
Or at least, your employer might be. Over the years we in the tech sector have gotten used to being well-regarded. After all, we make peoples lives better, on balance. Thats changing. At the moment its rumblings from thought leaders, not pervasive popular anger. The other thing thats new is that theyre thought leaders who are progressives and liberals; just like most of us in the tech professions. It notably involves the M-word and those of us on the inside need to be thinking about it. The general public, by and large, love reading the news of their friends and the world on Facebook, buying stuff cheap on Amazon, using Google maps and mail for free, and using recent Windows releases at work.
Photos of the Sky
I mean No Mans Sky the game, which Ive been playing again lately. Its been accused of being mostly a platform for generating cheesy sci-fi book covers, but thats not true, and also I love cheesy sci-fi book covers, so this is mostly to show you some. With a few words on the game. Oh, just flying my starship over the landscape ofa planet I recently discovered and named. As one does. Updates No Mans Sky launched just over a year ago, preceded by a massive hype wave and followed by howls of disappointment when it fell short of expectations.
Canadian Tax Wrangling
Our media, pro and social, echo with blasts of self-righteous anger over proposed legislation which would eliminate a few popular tax dodges. Weirdly, I see no-one arguing the other side; that the tax proposals are reasonable. I think Im qualified to make that argument, so I will. [If youre not Canadian, you can probably stop reading here.] The proposed tax changes Theyre summarized pretty well here. Basically, if you have a business and its incorporated say youre a doctor, lawyer, contractor, accountant, that kind of thing you can use your corporation for tax tricks, the effect being that you pay less tax on the same income.
Murder at Adolfs Cottage
I recently read Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr. Its good a Fifties-Iron-Curtain spy thriller gracefully mashed up with a pre-war murder mystery set in Hitlers Bavarian country getaway, Berghof. Its a repeat appearance for Kerrs Bernie Gunther, an appealingly hard-boiled veteran socialist cop who finds himself working for National Socialist management. And yep, there are Nazis in this story; the real not tiki-torch flavor. A couple of mega-Nazis, Bormann and Heydrich, and some relatively minor odd fish like Karl Brandt and Gerdy Troost. Nazis are convenient for a novelist, because they are reliably evil and twisted, so he can economize on characterization and leave room for plot and atmospherics.
Large Companies Considered Harmful
Theres a plausible case that capitalism per se isnt the problem. Concentration is: Variations range from too big to fail to good old-fashioned monopoly. Its painfully obvious that the acquisition of one monster telecom or bank or airline by another does neither their customers nor the economy as a whole any good. Its tough to write anti-monopoly law, because how do you quantify market power? However, you can quantify size. So lets use that as a club to bash away at the problem. Specifically: Pick a number X, and pass legislation decreeing that no company can have more than X full-time-equivalent employees.
Enlightenment Technology
Around 1500, the levels of technology and productivity in Europe and Asia were not dramatically different. But by 1700, Europe had leaped ahead and, by the twentieth century, mostly come to dominate the world; the labels Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution are commonly applied. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, a 2016 book by Joel Mokyr asks Why? and tries to answer. I encountered many jewels of insight and erudition in this book, which however is difficult, a rough read; Im not entirely comfy recommending it. But itd feel wrong not to pass a few jewels along, and in a couple places add perspectives that I think will resonate among geeks.
Olympus TG-5 Tough Waterproof
I found myself vacation-bound to Queensland (thats the top right corner of Australia) and the itinerary included beaches and coral, specifically the Great Barrier Reef, which is dying. I like to photograph the places I visit, and the Olympus TG-5 is getting lots of buzz in waterproof-cam circles, so I got one. The manual says that when its been in the ocean, you should give it a ten-minute freshwater soak. Camera geekery The Oly TG tough cameras have been underwater stalwarts for years, and the -5 differs from its predecessors notably in shooting RAW, offering 4K video, and having fewer megapixels, for better low-light sensitivity.
TLS Wiretap Fear
There is a hot lengthy argument going on in the IETFs TLS Working Group which has been making me uncomfortable. Its being alleged that there is an attempt to weaken Web security in a deep fundamental way, which if true is obviously a Big Deal. Whats an IETF TLS WG? TLS is a broad term for the family of crypto and related security protocols that make the Web secure. You may have noticed that more and more web addresses begin with https: rather than http: , which is a good and important thing; TLS in action. The standards behind this good and important thing are hammered out by the Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETFs) Transport Level Security (TLS) Working Group (WG).
Android Auto
I just had my first experience with Android Auto and I suppose there are lots of other people who havent been there yet, so a few words might be useful. Short form: Rough around the edges, but super-helpful. What with my job, I sometimes have to travel between Vancouver and downtown Seattle; all the options are lousy. Driving isnt my favorite but sometimes it happens. Recently I rented a car for the purpose; reserved the standard corporate-guidance minibox but they were overrun with summer tourists and, threatened with a long wait for the right car, I became That Guy you want out of your face.
On Password Managers
It has come to my attention that people are Wrong On The Internet about password managers. This matters, because almost everybody should be using one. Herewith background, opinions, and a description of my own setup, which is reasonably secure. What is a password manager? Its a piece of software that does the following (although not all of them do all of these): Store your passwords in a safe way, protected by at least a password, which we call the master password . Make new passwords for you. Heres an example of a generated password: QzbaLX}wA8Ad8awk. Youre not expected to remember these.
Map Review Fear
My daughter had a swollen infected face on a holiday morning, so I looked up nearby walk-in clinics on Google Maps. The place was deserted, efficient, and kind. Afterward, without even thinking about it, I tapped a good review into the map. Then I wondered if I might be part of a really big problem. On Google Im still broadly in sympathy with Googles efforts on the Internet, which have mostly made it better. And theyre so easy to understand: They want everyone to be online all the time to see ads, ideally on a Google property where they dont have to divvy the take.
Phone Obsession
On a recent Saturday night, a family connection got into trouble that took me on a rescue mission to a party gone wrong, then Emergency. Then it echoed into nightmare. At the party scene there was broken glass and shouting and eventually first responders, and a partier left by ambulance; I beat the officials there and tried to hold things together. This young woman, barefoot and disheveled in her party dress, wandered through the front room a couple of times, crying. And in between the sobs I cant find my phone. Fuck you! Ive lost my phone. Go away! I just gotta get my phone.
Bye, Rune
She was a purebred (Bengal) actually, with a formal name: Bellsangels Rune, and a pedigree. Born March 23, 1998, departed this life June 22nd, 2017, aetat 19 years and 3 months. She predated our children and digital cameras and this is the only obit shell get, so itll be lengthy. But not unamusing I hope, full of stories, and bookended by baseball. The Rune is because when she arrived the senior housecat was named Bodoni after the typeface, and we failed to find a font we fancied with a feminine feline name; since she was skinny and angular Rune seemed OK.
Games with Girls
Weirdly enough, for the first time in my life Ive been spending videogame time with members of the opposite gender; specifically, my wife and daughter. Which is an excuse for reflections on (and groovy pictures from) No Mans Sky. Open world, with spouse I saw a review somewhere and on impulse picked up Horizon Zero Dawn, a pretty and fast-moving open-world bowshooter. I was watching one of the early cinematics when Lauren walked by, got stuck, and sat on the sofa. Surprisingly, she stayed there after the movie while I steered Aloy (the female protagonist) off into the game. Very surprisingly, a bit later she started pointing out opportunities to harvest goodies and dodge monsters.
Pie Pride
I apologize in advance for bragging, something I do here only rarely. But my Mom taught me to make pie and now I make pies. Its a beautiful thing, and there are lessons to be had. Ive made two in fact. Heres the first, with Granny Smith apples inside. If you want the recipe, just roll the blog clock back a decade to August 2006, when I recorded my mothers narration. A lot of wisdom packed into six minutes or so of lousy but appealing audio. We visited her again this spring and I took a more intense lesson with hands-on and copious textual notes.
Gareth and Rune
Hes leaving and shes dying. Still, these are happy pictures. Thats Gareth Kirkby, a friend for decades, who came over for dinner because wed drifted apart, its been a while, and because hes leaving (has left now) for Asia, on a trip without a scheduled end. Hes political, a good writer and a good person and full of surprises. Well miss him. In his arms, Rune the Bengal cat, who is 19 years old and failing fast; a list of her ailments would fill too much sad space. But the interventions have (just barely) not reached abusive levels, and they happen without the hated trips to the vet.
Rock Surprise
On Saturday we accidentally took in two different very different pop-music concerts; I got one decent pic but ended the evening angry. Months ago, Id learned that All Them Witches were touring and bought Vancouver-gig tickets, because I liked the basic loud well-written tuneful guitar-rock songs Id heard on the radio or YouTube or somewhere. Then Lauren looked at the calendar and said But weve got Bobbis birthday party that night. But it was OK because the party was early. It was at the Fairview Pub, which Ive gone by on wheels and feet a zillion times, once or twice even recognizing the name of the bar band, but never inside.
I Dont Believe in Blockchain
There are conferences and foundations and consortia and keynotes; its the new hotness! But I looked into blockchain technologies carefully and Ive ended up thinking its an overpromoted niche sideshow. First off, I should say that I like blockchain, conceptually. Provably-immutable append-only data log with transaction validation based on asymmetric crypto, and (optionally) a Byzantine-generals solution too! Whats not to like? But I still dont think the world needs it. Im not stuck on the technical objections, for example to the laughably slow transactions-per-second of most real-world blockchain implementations. Where I work, scaling out horizontally to support a million TPS is table stakes.
Still Blogging in 2017
Not alone and not unread, but the ground underfoot aint steady. An instance of Homo economicus wouldnt be doing this no payday looming. So I guess Im not one of those. But hey, whenever I can steal an hour I can send the world whatever words and pictures occupy my mind and laptop. Which, all these years later, still feels like immense privilege. A lot of good writing is on Medium, which has learned its bloglessons. Shortish-to-longish form: check. Something fresh every day: check. Follow your faves: check. But on my phone, an irritating goober at the screens foot says open in app , trying to tempt me out of the blogosphere, off of the Web.
MLB Fan
I was in New York last week, and got to make a call on MLBAM, a really good customer of AWS, where I work. The first three letters in MLBAM mean baseball, of which Im a devotee; and also a happy five-year subscribing customer of MLB.tv. So I was feeling sort of multi-level fannish. It was super-fun, and I got a cute picture. MLBs in a nice corner of SoHo and the offices are drop-dead cool, although I suspect the bobblehead-and-memorabilia density might be a bit much for some. Anyhow, while youre waiting in the lobby you can admire their fine selection of trophies, a lot of them tech-geek stuff.
Six-page Typography
What happened was, I ran across Bringhursts The Elements of Typographic Style and was instantly captivated, by the books beauty and also the power of its message. So Ive got typography on my mind. Stand by for more on the subject, but it struck me immediately that Im living a typography lesson at work, in the form of the famous Amazon six-pager. Its not a secret; to start with, read Brad Porters excellent The Beauty of Amazons 6-Pager (although in typo-geek mode, I have to point out that Six-pager reads much more nicely than 6-Pager ). Like Brad says, we put intense work into writing these things, and then others of us put intense work into reading them.
2017 Camera News
Herewith some reportage on the most interesting cameras in the world, with opinions to provoke er entertain people who are up on this stuff, and a basic survey of the landscape for people who like pictures and wonder about cameras. Im an enthusiast photog (not remotely pro) and Ive noticed, over the years, when I write generally about whats up with cameras, I get notes from people saying thanks, that was interesting . I think I may have sold a few cameras over the years, even. Conclusions first Lets see if we can start some arguments. The most interesting cameras in the world right now are the new digital medium formats : Fujifilm GFX 50S, Pentax 645Z, and Hasselblad X1D.
JSONPath
Or should be that be JsonPath? Whatever, its a tool Ive been using lately and generally like. But it could use a little work. The last project I worked on, Step Functions, has a JSON DSL for State Machines, which makes use of JSONPath (see Paths and Input and Output Procesing) to solve a tricky problem in a way that people seem to find easy to understand and use. Early on in that project we adopted the Jayway JsonPath library and it seems to mostly Just Work. But, weve had a few questions from customer along the lines of Your service rejected my InputPath, but it looks OK to me. Which raises the question: What is a legal JsonPath, anyhow?
IsItOnAWS Lessons
I did some recreational programming over Christmas and the blog I wrote about it is now guesting in Jeff Barrs space for your amusement; try the software at IsItOnAWS.com. What I didnt do there was relay the lessons I picked up along the way; one or two are around AWS, but most follow from this being my first nontrivial expedition into the land of NodeJS. So (acknowledging that only 0.8% of my profession arent already Nodesters), here they are. Spoiler: I dont like Node very much. Lesson: Lambda has historically been used for behind-the-scenes work. But with the recent arrival of new API Gateway and Certificate Manager goodies, its become pretty easy to convince a function to serve HTTP requests pointed at your own web-space.
Contradictions
Back when I was an actual Marxist, we used to talk about the contradictions of capitalism . Its actually a handy phrase (alliterative too!) and recently I feel like the Internet is trying to stuff those contradictions down my throat. Fish in a barrel Its not exactly hard to reel them off. Item: The owners of every business are incented to pay their employees as little as possible, but need their customers to have spare money in their pockets. Item: Prosperity depends on growth, everyone knows that; but were using our ecosystem fully and population curves around the world range from flattening growth to steepening decline.
Garage Color Fix
I was out the other day shooting signs of spring; there was this garage, and it was pretty too. Color partly by some paint company, augmented by quite a few years of Prairie weather. Isnt it pretty? The reason Im writing this is that its the first time in years Ive had to put significant work into color repair on a Fujifilm pic. Because the version above looks just like what I saw. But out of the camera, it looked like this: Back in my Pentax days, I got pretty slick with the Lightroom white-balance apparatus, which is itself pretty slick.
Prairie Spring
Most places know four seasons, but for the most intense experience of spring you really come Up North. Im in Saskatchewan visiting my Mom, went for a short walk in the park behind her house, and came back with pictures of the experience. Most obviously, the snow is retreating. With the melting and freezing of early spring, some of the snow is now crumbly puddled ice, which is melting in the cold March sun, and faster given an excuse. An excuse for a little Physics Moment with my ten-year-old: Hey girl, why did the ice melt over the leaf? But that ice is being attacked from below as above; see the blades of grass straining away?
Whiteboard Interviews
The other day, I joined a semi-viral tweet chain with Ive been coding since 1979 and I still have to look up java.lang.String methods all the time. There were a bunch of programmers doing this and I thought it constituted amusing humility while also making a useful point: Remembering the details of any particular API or algorithm is irrelevant. Turns out I was part of a trend, see TheOutline: Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins to Protest a Broken Job Interview Process. Except for, thats bullshit; I still do whiteboards at interviews, and I dont think the idea is broken. (Also, theyre not sins.)
Spaced Paragraphs in Word
The Internet is fierce with polemics about one-space-or-two-after-the-period. Bah, lightweight stuff. What about all those poor people you see making MS Word docs look a little more spacious by inserting an extra empty line between paragraphs? There is a better way! But the Office UI (on Mac at least) is heinous, so heres a step-by-step. Behold two paragraphs of text, crushed unkindly against each other. What you want to do is tell Word to henceforth leave a tasteful amount of space between all your paragraphs, without you having to moronically double-Enter. You pull down the Format menu and select Style , for reasons which are obvious if you understand how Word thinks about the presentation units that it manages for you.
Looking Up
Seems like everyone I know is blue and grouchy and angry; cant say as I blame them. But its time to turn a corner, because the futures just as long as ever, and we need joy to face it. Let me see if I can help. Canadas first few crocuses are up! Yes, I did blog about the spring crocuses in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (twice!) , 2009 (twice!) , 2010 (twice!) , 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Clearly I need to remediate 2016s lacklustre performance. Once again, as I often do, I should echo the question from John Crowleys awesome Little, Big (seriously, one of the best books): What is Brother North-Winds secret? The answer: If Winter comes, Spring cant be far behind. This winter, our discontent has been political mostly.
Geek Career Paths
Suppose youre doing technology, and like doing technology, and your careers going well, and you find yourself wondering what youre going to be doing in twenty years. Ive been down several of the roads you might decide to take, and it occurs to me that talking them over might amuse and inform. Thanks are due to Andre Leibovici, who tweeted Is it possible to be in a sr. leadership position and still be hands-on w/ tech & code? For geek leaders out there... how to juggle? and got me thinking about this. Q: Should you stay in tech-related work? Seriously, this is the most important question.
Two AWS Years
Wow, it was December 2014 when I climbed on board this train. Im sitting in a pretty interesting place and feel I owe the world some reportage. In terms of what its like to work to work here, I dont have much to add to last years write-up. Since then Ive got my fingerprints all over two AWS services: CloudWatch Events and Step Functions. There are few things as much fun as helping ship something and watching people start to use it. If you want opinions on what those products mean and how well they work, there are lots of blogs out there written by people who are less biased.
Time Machine Completed the Backup
Recently, I acquired a Synology DiskStation and wired up a nice comforting Time Machine-to-Synology-to-S3-to-Glacier backup data flow. But then I started to see Time Machine couldnt complete the backup with something about could not be accessed (error 21) . Heres how it got fixed. [This piece placed here to attract search-engine attention and, with luck, help someone else dig out. If youre feeling public-spirited, toss in a couple links for visibilitys sake.] I was tempted to give up, but the thing was working fine for my wife, who however was not yet on Sierra; there was some Twitter rumbling about Sierra and Synology having relationship problems.
Shooter as Tabula Rasa
Last night I accidentally came face to face with Twitter horror, a very pale reflection of larger real-life horror, but still jarring. What happened was, someone shot up a Québec City mosque. For a few hours nobody knew whod done the shooting, and that absence of identity became a blank canvas which the Nets trolls painted with their shit-colored dreams. I got interested in the story and like everyone else was curious who the bad guys were. Watched Twitter because thats what you do when news is hanging fire. Tuned in the Radio Canada (French-language) livestream of the 1:45AM Eastern Time press conference by the Québec Premier, the Québec city mayor, and the police chief, which was emotional and had the sad facts about deaths and injuries, but didnt ID the shooters.
The Womens March
Just like everyone else I have a theory about What It Means, but I also have a story and a cool picture to illustrate. We go to a few choir concerts, since my wife sings in one and is part of that social network. On January 21st in a two-choir show, the second half featured Roots N Wings, an all-women ensemble. They opened with just a few singers on stage, then the rest came up the aisles, singing Aint Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (one of the Freedom Songs), some with the hats, some with signs. The crowd came alive, on their feet, clapping and yelling, singing along.
China Story
I recently read Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. It was shortlisted for, but didnt win, the Man Booker. Its wonderful but its not her best; Dogs at the Perimeter from 2011 is I think the best novel Ive read this century. Herewith notes on both. Do Not Say This ones about an extended Chinese family, containing many musicians, all over China and (briefly) in Canada. It starts during the Japanese occupation and leaves off nicely in 2016 without really ending. Along with the musicians, leading actors include the Anti-Landlord Campaign, the anti-Rightist Movement, the Cultural Revolution, and the uprising that ended in blood on Tienanmens stones.
Èê³ and Me
Ive been sending fewer words out onto the Net so far this year, and one of the reasons was The Last Guardian, which I finished last night. Now Im missing it and maybe writing about it will help. Theres been controversy about the game but I think that on balance its great, one of 2016s more significant works of art, and also a dozen or two hours of fine entertainment for those cold winter evenings. Im going to wrap my impressions around a handful of my screen-grabs the Internet has better ones, but these are mine. I couldnt bring myself to scale them down, so theyre a gift for those of you with big screens; for the rest of you, try clicking on, then shrinking, a couple, to get the full effect.
Florida Gothick Fun
I refer to Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen, which I enjoyed more than any other single book I read this year. Not saying its the best book of the year; but in late 2016, reading something that makes you repeatedly laugh out loud over a span of hours is not to be sneezed at. Ive previously plugged Hiaasen in this space, although not in this decade. Previously I would have said that my fave Hiaasen was Sick Puppy, but I recently re-read it and its dated a bit. Dont know where Id rank this in the Hiaasen hit parade, but I sure enjoyed the hell out of it.
Network Storage
A couple days ago in New Home Network I posted a request for advice on a home NAS box and networking hardware. Now I have the storage box, and boy was it ever easy and straightforward and anxiety-relieving. If you havent done this already, you might want to. The online reviews favor QNAP and Synology; the comments on my blog suggested Synology or build-your-own-its fun. I have opinions about fun and about storage for my irreplaceable digital life and they dont intersect. So I bought a Synology DS416j and two Western Digital Red 6T drives from fave local retailer NCIX if youre in Canada, you cant beat em.
New Home Network
Holiday project: Redesign the domestic infastructure. Looking for: Network and storage gear. Got any advice? Our current setup, a Mac Pro and Apple Airport, work fine. But their combined age is approaching 20 years, disks are getting full, and Im losing faith that Apple really wants that part of my business. Requirements The Internet comes in through a cable modem in the basement in a horrible spot for networking. Its rated at 150M and measures a little faster than that. The modem has dorky wireless feature which weve turned off, and theres Cat5 coming upstairs to a nice central-but-unobtrusive spot for broadcasting Wifi from.
Snow Studies
Vancouvers last two winters had no snow, and never even got very cold. Just now weve had a week of white pre-Christmas, with lows down to -8°C. But tonight the rain starts and well hit 9 above tomorrow. So I went out to take snow pictures. Our magnolia is never not beautiful Lets step back from it, enlarge our view enough to see the big evergreen behind it. At dusk I walked to the corner for groceries and fresh air, and saw this, photographed it, then came home and overprocessed it.
On Loving Rock and Roll
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby. I like more or less all the music, at least all of its that written by humans and performed by musicians, which excludes most modern industrial. But Rock is the music of my time and tribe, and while other kinds can make me dream and weep, its the only one where the first guitar chord makes me smile and before long I cant not dance. Half a century In 1966, shrimpy 11-year-old me was on a pre-Christmas visit to my uncle in Drumheller, Alberta, and then we drove back to Edmonton, only a few highway hours but his car heater was on the blink and it was like -20°, so we stopped in a diner at least once an hour to warm up.
Things about re:Invent
The AWSpalooza took me to Vegas for four nights, with thirty thousand or so other cloud-heads. Herewith notes and sparkly Vegas pictures. Growth The numbers tell the story: from 12K to 19K to 32K, and I dont see any reason itll slow down. While the organization and logistics were formidable, obviously the work of seasoned pros, were getting close to the limit of what those venues can bear. Im pretty relaxed about life, but had a couple of little claustrophobia flashes, when the crowds overfilled those huge hallways. I took along the Achromat lens because its good at sparkly things and Vegas has lots of those.
Validating State Machines
This morning we released AWS Step Functions, a Serverless Distributed Cloud Microservices Polyglot Workflow Orchestration Coordinator thingie. Its cool; you want to read about it, visit Jeff Barrs joint. Step Functions uses state machines specified in a JSON DSL called the States language. This piece is about the two validators I wrote for States documents, one of which is interesting. Not that many people care about validators and parsers; so if you think you probably wont be interested in the rest of this piece, youre probably right. The validator in the service Like most AWS Services, Step Functions has a front-end that handles the API calls and dispatches the work.
Achromat Photowalk
On a recent cold and damp (but not actually rainy) evening I was invited on a Fujifilm-sponsored photowalk on Vancouvers Granville Island. The day before, Id received the fruits of a whimsical Kickstarter splashout from months and months back: a Daguerrotype Achromat 2.9/64 Art Lens from Lomography. It was great fun among the sparkles in the dark. The lens looks like this: It has a Pentax K-mount, fastened here to my Fuji XT-1 using a Fotodiox adapter. Look at the fancy writing on the narrow part of the lens, then look a little further away from the camera body, above the writing, and you see a black slot in the top of the lens.
Fujifilm Photowalk
On Sunday, I bought new shoes. On Monday, I got my Kickstarter-backed long-delayed Daguerrotype Achromat 2.9/64 Art Lens. Thus, on Tuesday I was well-prepared for a Fujifilm-sponsored photowalk on Vancouvers Granville Island. Thats the Granville Street bridge,with the downtown condo wall behind it and a supermoon above. Sometime in the 3½ years Ive been in Fuji-land I got on their mailing list, which is OK because its low-volume and, well, got me this invite. The ultimate hosts were Fujifilm Canada (whose President and SVP were there), but also present and helping were The Fuji Guys and Beau Photo. I wish I had the cycles to do more photowalks.
Pixel Abuse
What happened was, I went down to the dock in the dark, and took pictures that no phone-cam should ever be asked to take. You might be amused. I was with my ten-year-old daughter; The sky was black but the moon was full, its shadows knife-edged, first moonshadows shed ever seen. Its light, edging round the slope of our island, looked cool, only I didnt have a real camera, just my Google Pixel. Hmm, I sense a challenge. Heres the unimproved all-the-defaults version, which has a bit of primitive poetry perhaps. So for the first time I got serious with the manual controls on the Lightroom camera app; cranked the ISO up and the shutter speed down, held the phone against one of the dock pilings, and growled at the girl to stop bouncing.
Software-Defined Cameras
When I pull out my Pixel for a picture, I have to pick which app to tap: Googles Android camera (which oddly seems to have no link) and Adobe Lightrooms. The choice isnt hard, but is interesting. Let me lead with some actual pictures. In each case, the G-cam is first, the Lr-cam second. Howe Sound at dusk. Cabin overlooking Howe Sound, at dusk. The differences are subtle, and probably only matter if youre going to be using a really big screen or piece of paper for delivery. If youre the kind of person who cares, click-to-enlarge and, before I talk about the differences, see if you have opinions.
Big-Show Tech
Im all stressed out getting ready for re:Invent, Nov 28th through Dec 2nd this year, in Vegas. Im attending, and may even be speaking if certain pieces fall into place. Ive seen this movie before. At Sun, it was Java One. At Google, I/O. Every big tech company has one. They define the rhythm of the year, and Im wondering if theyre a good idea. Big! Most readers here have probably been to one or more, but for those who havent, heres how it goes. First of all, big is relative. Google and Apple favor San Franciscos Moscone West, a nice welcoming light-filled venue which maxes out at 5,500 heads.
How to Give Away an Android
You take your nice modern Android, you factory-reset it, and you give (or sell) it to a relative (or friend, or stranger). (In my case, give and son .) But when they turn it on they see a screen labeled Verify your account with text reading This device was reset. To continue, sign in with a Google Account that was previously synced on this device. Heres one way to fix the problem. You, the original answer, grab the phone. Sign in with the primary account you used. Say No to all the sync options you get offered (to save time). Say No when asked if you want fingerprint protection, nodding at the text that warns you that if you bypass it, your device will be usable by a thief after reset.
After Mac?
So, there are new MacBooks and many people are unhappy. Tl;dr: Apple thinks thin-and-light is more important than well-equipped-and-powerful. I griped on Twitter and got a storm of responses, mostly on the subject of other ways I might be able to get what I want from a computer. Sidebar 1 First off: Apple may well be right. Over the past couple of decades, the vast majority of their product launches have hit the sweet spot, turning out to be what people needed even if thats what they didnt think they wanted. Sidebar 2 At work, I use a Mac and it suits me just fine.
Sold My Google Shares
I want the author piece linked in the sidebar to be a full disclosure of the financial interests of the person whos writing what youre reading. I think online writing without such a disclosure is troubling. Anyhow, my financial disclosures no longer include Google, because I sold all my shares last week. Not an insider Because this ongoing fragment touches on money, I should be clear that I have no material non-public information that might give me insight into the future of the Google share price. (In fact, Im not sure I ever did, even when I was working there.)
Pixel Notes
I pre-ordered the basic Pixel (5", 32G, Silver) because the 5X was getting on my nerves (more below); here are early-days notes. Tl;dr: Ugly, solid, fast, cool camera. No new build So, heres the secret insider story of where little mobile builds come from. Word goes around that the software has to ship by Date X to meet the hardware launch date. Usually its not ready, so what happens is they ship an interim build and then, some weeks later when the phones hit the shelves and people are starting to turn them on, when people turn them on they get prompted to download the real build.
Message Processing Styles
Recently Im thinking about how we process messages in networked software. Consider this Java snippet, for example. < !-- HTML generated using hilite.me -->boolean isPassNode(final JsonNode node) { if (node.isObject()) { final JsonNode child = node.get(Constants.TYPE_FIELD); if (child != null) { if (child.isTextual()) { return Constants.PASS_TYPE.equals(child.asText()); } } } return false; } Which asks: Is this a JSON object with a top-level Type field whose value is the string Pass ? Is this a sane thing to want to do? And if so, whats a good way to do it?
Fall Dark
Most years I hate this season; less light every day, and with every gust a whirl of summer leaves torn from winter branches. Maybe I dislike the resonance with my lifes own greybeard season. Maybe its the trio of huge Pacific storms were dealing with. Lets be honest: Mostly, its shitty US politics. Some of the colors are beautiful though. These days, it needs an effort of will to look away from Americas slow titanic electoral trainwreck. We should make that effort. All it takes is going for a walk and leaving your mobile in your pocket. At least for a few minutes.
Wrong About Cameras
Todays Wrongness Exhibit is iPhone 7 vs Leica M9-P: A Side-by-Side Photo Comparison by Michael Zhang, which demonstrates any fool can plainly see, look at the photos that an iPhone 7 takes pictures just as well as a $9K Leica setup. The wrongness here is extreme and, I think, instructive. Lets start with the picture in Zhangs piece, of a Japanese shrine in the rain. Lets see; it is medium-distance, even-depth-of-field, well-lit, and low-dynamic-range. Which is to say, about as easy to get right as a photograph can be. The kind of scenario where you dont need a Leica; in fact, maybe you dont even need a recent iPhone.
Still Playing No Mans Sky
Usually before I go to bed, for an hour or so. Idly poking around planets, finding stuff to beef up my weapon or suit or ship, chatting with aliens. Except for Ive decided to head for the center of the galaxy, so maybe Ill be done soon, whatever that means. This is mostly to pass along tips and share pix. Sharing an evening vista with a weird plant. The little red shield means my inventory was (as it used to be, usually) full. Its an easy game Seriously. Yes there are skills you need to learn, and youll die a few times until you learn them.
Focal Length and Angle
If you care about cameras you probably like learning about interesting new (and old) lenses. Theyre described by two numbers: How wide they open (also: aperture, brightness, speed), and how long they are (also: focal length). That first number is generally comparable across lenses: Lower is better. The aperture unit, F-stop , is hardly intuitive, but whatever. Focal lengths are hard to compare, because how much the lens sees depends on how big the sensor behind it is, and there are lots of different sensor sizes. Generally, focal lengths are expressed as 35mm equivalent , meaning If we stuck this lens in front of a sensor the size of traditional photographic film, which is the same size used in modern expensive digital cameras, heres what the focal length would be. Which is dumb and irritating, because thats not the number printed on the side of the lens, and anyhow, the number itself ...
Old Geek
Im one. Were not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations. This was provoked by a post from James Gosling, which Ill reproduce because it was on Facebook and I dont care to learn how to link into there: Almost every old friend of mine is screwed. In the time between Sun and LRI Id get lines like We normally dont hire people your age, but in your case we might make an exception . In my brief stint at Google I had several guys in their 30s talk about cosmetic surgery.
The Fixing-JSON Conversation
Last week I suggested some modest JSON improvements, and conversation ensued. Obviously, much was Hes Wrong On The Internet (again) but lots was juicy and tasty, and worth considering further. This is based on reaction in my own comments, and on Hacker News. Just use X For values of X including Hjson, Amazon Ion, edn, Transit, YAML, and TOML. Nah, most of them are way, way richer than JSON, often with fully-worked-out type systems and Conceptual Tutorials and so on. I just want JSON thats easier to edit and can do timestamps. Hmm, SON looks pretty close to what Im thinking.
Fixing JSON
Ive edited a couple of the JSON RFCs, and am working on the design of a fairly complex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deeper in the JSON mines than most. We can easily agree on whats wrong with JSON, and I cant help wondering if itd be worth fixing it. Major irritant: Commas Hand-editing JSON may not be the most important way of interacting with it, but it shouldnt be as hard as it is. In particular, when Im moving things around in a chunk of JSON I can never, as in NEVER, get the commas right.
Light Transmission
Lots of photographers, and people who teach them, talk about the advantages of shooting under a cloudy sky, or of having the suns light behind you. Increasingly, Im enjoying pointing my camera straight into the sun. Of course, as above, this can force you into a monochrome presentation (although the dock above is in color). But I remember, during my time in publishing technology and then again in VR, learning about emissive as opposed to reflective color. I dont remember the physics or the engineering, but I like it. Of course, the color/monochrome continuum isnt binary. Lets take three steps into total whiteness overload.
Things About No Mans Sky
Of course, I had to pre-order this one after reading World Without End in The New Yorker. Ive only played a few evenings, havent done anything ambitious, but Ive learned that when youre learning something is a good time to write about it. Its just really cool bringing your ship in for a landing on a new planet. There seems to be a consensus that with this game, spoilers are a virtue; I think I would have found it severely frustrating if Id had to puzzle out all the crap I picked up in a quick scan of Reddit & IGN.
Home Computer?
Weve got this big old Mac Pro in the living room, a 2008 model; I call it the family mainframe . Im thinking it might get replaced with a Windows box. Long-time readers may remember this computer; I caused a mild Web sensation back in 2008 back when I invited opinions on whether I should hack it. With a hacksaw, I mean. Do you even need one? The conventional wisdom is No, because everyone has a laptop and a mobile and many living rooms will have a tablet or two lying around. I think you do, especially if you have kids. Theyll be wanting screen time, and I like having them at a computer thats in the room with the family, not hidden away upstairs; using a screen thats facing the family, not the wall.
Susan and her SQL Problem
As usual, it all started out innocently enough. Susan [ed: names have been changed to protect privacy] had no way to meet the deadlines her bosses had set for her. Bob had recently and abruptly left the company, and Melissa was on an extended medical absence, leaving Susan to do the work of three people. That is, three people each trying to reconcile a few dozen 40,000+ row Excel spreadsheets representing the general ledger of the Fortune 1000 company they consulted for. She was about to brush off ever-chatty and annoying Michael from Compliance when, for once, he recognized the stress she was under and said something useful.
Corporate Pride
Theres this nice video message in the elevators at work, about the Pride Parade. And its making me uneasy. I took a picture of the message and its a fine thing; gives me a warm glow. Especially since theres going to be a big Amazon contingent in Vancouvers parade, which is a powerful, uplifting occasion. I have some history here: back in the Seventies, I was on the colleges student-paper staff and we sponsored and hyped up the first ever Gay Dance. Pretty radical at the time; you cant imagine the freakout among the Engineering jocks and Aggies. Three decades later, I have the coolest-ever rainbow-flag sticker over the glowy apple on my Mac.
Vegetables!
This morning we went to the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market, which is small and good, if kind of pricey. Its soup-to-nuts where by soup-to-nuts , I mean meat, vegetables, and booze. I approve of all three, but it was the vegetables in the sun that wanted to be photographed. We bought everything wed need for dinner, including the potatoes in the second-last photo, which werent bad; but the highlight was the sockeye salmon the guy had caught the day before just off Port Alberni.
The REST Report
We were talking at work about Serverless: Whats the right tooling for developers building that kind of app? One of the businesspeople in the room said Wont developers need s special UI construction kit for Serverless apps? The technical people all looked blank, because REST. Browser code doesnt care (nor does a new-fangled React thingie, nor an iOS/Android app) whats hiding behind that HTTP POST. REST is more or less totally dominant among app builders today. Is there any prospect of that changing? What we talk about when we talk about REST HTTP CRUD. Well, HTTPS actually these days, thank goodness.
Video and Speed
Im sure you know the feeling you see a link to something that looks interesting, follow it, and when it turns out to be a video clip, you shake your head and kill the tab. The problem with video is its just too slow. But sometimes slow is OK, and maybe video can be fixed. This was provoked by I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything by Jeff Guo, which recommends watching video, by default, in fast-forward mode. The pitch is compelling, Ill probably pick the habit up. Right now I watch almost no Web video, but maybe thatll change.
New British Isles
Following on the British EU referendum, some political re-alignment of the British Isles feels inevitable. I propose a re-organization into three states: Ireland, Britain, and Dál Riata (or perhaps Dalriada) which comprises what we now call Scotland and Northern Ireland. Heres a map. Vital Statistics Britain remains the big dog; but the new kid on the block is no slouch; about the same population as Bulgaria (less than Switzerland, more than Denmark) and about as big as Hungary (smaller than Iceland, bigger than Portugal). BritainDál RiataIreland Population (M)56.17.14.6 Area (km2)130,39594,62070,273 Dál What? The names are pretty easy; Ireland already has one, and what was once The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland loses its second half and is a little less Great , so Britain falls out naturally.
Other American Gods
I just finished reading The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, who also writes geek books about Linux and Apache and so on. I enjoyed it, its a page-turner. One of the reviewers on Amazon said This is what Gaimans American Gods should have been. Im not sure Id go that far, but both address the tricky problem of divine personae lodged in Middle America. Its a big sprawling messy book with subdivisions and malls and trucker bars, and then theres Father, a heartless God who fosters young Americans and trains them up, what business people call succession planning .
A Really Bad Year
I just finished reading 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and enjoyed it a lot. You might not though, unless youre interested in the ancient Near East (from Greece to Egypt inclusive), or the practice of archaeology. Well, or the large-scale systemic collapse of great empires. It turns out that in the centuries leading up to 1200 B.C., this part of the world was mostly occupied by biggish Bronze-Age nations: Egyptian, Hittite, Mittani, Babylonian & Assyrian, Mycenaean. Trade was brisk and multipolar. Culture mashups happened; you can find Cretan frescoes in Egyptian palaces of the day. But by 1130 it was all over; most great cities had burned, commerce had collapsed, and alphabets were starting to replace the cuneiform, hieroglyphic, and linear scripts.
On the Left
I have a problem lately: When I look in the mirror, I see a left-wing extremist. Im uneasy about my strengthening belief that Free Enterprise is gonna ruin everything good unless we take a knife to its testicles first. I think we need to: Tax the crap out of the 1% [disclosure: Im one], stamp out most forms of high-leverage financial speculation, introduce ruthless transparency such that any asset whose beneficial ownership cannot be established where legally appropriate is subject to summary confiscation, adopt a zero-tolerance posture on business crime, with jail time regularly administered for significant financial misdeeds, in rough proportion to the size of the takings, and roll out a universal basic income to deal with the inevitable decline in the proportion of humans enjoying full employment.
YouTube Addiction?
You hear talk about Internet overload/addiction, but this very specific form has crossed my radar multiple times in recent days. In students, specifically. To the extent of failing multiple courses. Because they use laptops for everything, and YouTube is always a Cmd-Tab away, and whether your itch is Team Fortress 2 or cat breeding or string quartets or tentacles, theres always something new and fresh there to scratch it. So teachers dont get heard and homework doesnt get done. My hunch is its a real thing. Anyone else?
Another JSON Schema Gripe
Recently I wrote of my disgruntlement with JSON Schema. Since then Ive learned that its authors plan more work, and that there are several other efforts to build a schema facility for JSON. This note is just a complaint about a particular use-case, with the hope that it might inform these efforts. Heres the problem; the language Im building includes a big object whose fields are also objects, and each of these child objects has a Type field, whose value is, in effect, an enum; a constrained set of string values. The rest of the fields in each child object depend on the Type value.
Hemlock Ocean
I care most about the ocean, while Lauren cares more for the forest; fortunately the Pacific Northwest offers Cottage-Life compromises; illustrated with the help of a giant Hemlock. What happened was, a few years ago a construction project accidentally left behind a bare earth platform down near the water. We ordered 10kg of Coastal Forest Revegetation Seed Mix and used it liberally; now its a delightful little meadow, suitable for stretching out and considering the great seaside evergreens. Heres a sideways look, lying down. Fortunately nobody was nearby watching me scrunch myself down behind the camera and bend away unsightly blades.
On Color
I just enjoyed reading The Search for Our Missing Colors by Amos Zeeberg in The New Yorker, and it gives me mental wire to hang some words and pictures on color and its absence. Color is hard I spent a few years in the publishing-technology business. Id go to the conferences, and thered always be seminars and boot-camps on Color. Like, twelve hours over two days, advertised as An introduction to a few of the basic issues in color. Lightly processed: backed off the highlights, darkened the darks, sharpened a bit. And applied Lightrooms PROVIA/STANDARD profile. Spend a little while digging into gamuts and color spaces and Pantone and CMYK and transmission and emission and reflection and so on, and youll see what they mean.
Specifying JSON
I find myself tasked with polishing and publishing a little custom JSON-encoded language. Its harder than it ought to be. This didnt start with the language, it started with prototype software this guy wrote, that did something old and familiar in a new and dramatically better way. He replaced a bunch of gnarly old code with a few JSON templates to save time. Now, in the rearview, the JSON looks like an important part of an important product. And theres a lesson in that: All the good markup vocabularies are discovered by coders trying to get shit done, not cooked up in committee rooms in advance of software.
Photographer ?
Everyone takes pictures everywhere now, 24/7/365. So does photographer , in the amateur sense, still mean anything? I have pictures and questions that say it does. This is provoked by Om Maliks In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing in the New Yorker. It quotes Sontag (de rigeur for that subject in those pages I suppose), flirts with that seductive ol Internet Contrarianism, says smart things about photo software in general and and Googles Nik Collection in particular, and has plenty of arm-wavey futurology about Evolution and Conversation. I found the piece flat, partly because (oddly) it contains none of the authors photos; thus just words about pictures.
Speaker Dust Cap Dent Repair
As previously noted in this space, Im a deranged audiophile, and for some years my speakers of choice have been from Totem, out of Montréal. In a recent renovation a woofer got a dent in a dust cap, where by dent I mean it was pushed in. Im posting the solution here in the hopes that future searchers will find it. I was sitting up late listening to Coltrane and something about the sound just wasnt gelling. Eventually it bothered me enough to turn on the lights and even then it took a while to spot the problem, illustrated below. The round thing in the center of the lower driver is supposed to be smooth and convex, not uneven and concave.
Getting the Picture
Its like this: Averages are your enemy because they hide change. Making graphs is cheap and easy and more of us should do it more. What happened was, I was working on some software that takes an incoming flow of messages and stuffs them into an Amazon Kinesis stream. Kinesis is a thing that can soak up a whole lot of data really fast; the way it works is that you configure it with a number of shards , and each shard can soak up a thousand messages per second, or a megabyte per second, whichever comes first. Theres nice software for reading them out and doing useful stuff with them.
Cool Aussie Phoners
What the title says: Three photos of Aussies holding phones looking cool. Some people think street photography is supposed to be B&W and sad, but Ive never understood that. The first two of these are in Melbourne.
Serverlessness
Today Microsoft announced Azure Functions, joining Google Cloud Functions and (from 2014) AWS Lambda. This is fun stuff, and might be a big deal. In the beginning was the server. The last one I ever bought was from Dell; I can remember hauling it out of the cardboard and sliding it into the rack. I pinched a finger badly enough that there was blood on the floor. Then I had to argue with the sysadmin over Debian vs Red Hat. So, now that we have cloud biggies like the three companies named in the first paragraph [disclosure, I work for AWS] nobody has to shed blood deploying servers.
Mobile Aerials
A little while ago I tweeted One thing phone-cams arent much good for is shooting out airplane windows. Since then, Ive noticed my Nexus 5X looking at me in a hurt sort of way. It seems I was wrong. These are both taken somewhere over Australia.
Lenses and Cameras in 2016
Im on the way back from a couple of weeks in Australia, and of course Pictures Were Taken. I brought almost all my photo-gear but used it very unevenly; concluded that I have too many lenses, and was left wondering whether you really even need a camera any more. Herewith notes illustrated with Pacific-ocean (mostly) pictures. Numbers Dont know how many I took, but among the photos I kept, 14 were with the Nexus 5X, 119 with the Fujifilm X-T1. Lens stats for the latter: Fuji 35mm 58 Fuji 55-200mm 26 Pentax 50mm 23 Fuji 18-55 4 Pentax 100mm 4 Fuji 10-24mm 4 Wide angle lenses?
Parrot Story
Were visiting friends in Australia and I watched a pair of parrots interact; photographed them, but didnt understand. Oh, and a koala. This was actually at a Koala Reserve on Phillip Island, not terribly far from Melbourne; my 9-year-old insisted. Koala-watching has a Wheres-Waldo flavor, since they are usually asleep, wedged into a tree-fork near where they last stopped eating. So I wandering around trying to spot the stars of the show, and discovered these charming birds. There was interaction going on; one parrot was occasionally snuggling and nuzzling the other totally cute. I looked away and suddenly, with a discordant bird-noise outbreak, one of them was flying away, while the one left behind had expanded his-or-her crest.
Urbanity
Cities are our rule now, anything else the exception. Im biking most workdays, on concrete over the ocean into the stone heart of a small big city, getting ten dozen channels of nonstop urban input and every day I wonder where were all going. The future is distributed unevenly and cities concentrate the unevenness. The balconies and windows are full of stories. That buildings in the West End, a super-dense part of a pretty-dense city. As you can see, its not all pretty; the upscale condo developers, fueled (the story goes) by overseas capital, circle these towers like vultures, looking for a chance to evict retirees and immigrants and singles to build anew.
Lightroom, Mobile, Nexus
In which I report on using the Nexus 5X in RAW mode, with the help of Adobe Lightroom, and on workflows for mobile photogs. With illustrations from Vancouvers Lighthouse Park. Backgrounder on RAW (Skip to the next section if you know all this stuff.) A RAW picture is supposed to be a bit-for-bit reproduction of exactly what the sensor in your camera saw. RAW pictures usually take up lots of memory, and doing a good job of presenting them on your screen often requires inside knowledge of the quirks of the camera and its sensor. There are a bunch of different RAW formats, but the industry seems to be converging on DNG, which is proprietary but still reasonably open and apparently technically sound.
Dell U3415W
34", 21:9, 3440x1440. Which is to say, pretty big and pretty sharp. Full name: Dell UltraSharp 34 Curved Monitor. Its curved. I like it a lot. Thats a 13" MacBook Pro off to the left. To avoid revealing AWSsecrets, I filled the screen with the Ingress map and parked a browser window over it for scale, and another on the laptop. What happened was, Amazons got an engineering hardware refresh rolling around, which included a choice between either this beast or dual 27" monitors. The guys who deal them out tell me the choice is breaking more or less fifty-fifty.
Modern Corporate English
The clients ask is simple, he said, but Im not convicted thats a good criteria; anyhow, there are important learnings for us. How much of that do you hate? Whatever; living languages dont care what you think. The awful truth English, among languages, is a shiftless tramp, equally at home in the alleys behind mansions and hovels. Its always ready to pilfer a scrumptious linguistic pie left to cool on a metaphorical windowsill, or fetid food-waste from the metaphorical gutter. These growths on Englishs not-so-fair face are harvested from the hallways and meeting rooms of North American high-tech, which is after all renowned for its creativity.
CL XXXVI: Island Ingress
On a wet grey February Saturday we combined two of our amusements on a boat trip to Keats Island: Cottage Life and Ingress. Some of this will be comprehensible only to Ingress players, but there are a couple of fairly groovy pix. What happened was, right near our cabin theres North Keats Crosspath, an Ingress portal (that link will only work if youre a player) which I had owned for an awesome 449 consecutive days, until one of the opposition made a fairly heroic night-time boat trip and captured it a week ago. This was Not To Be Tolerated, so I and my wife (and fellow-player) arranged child-care, broke out the boat, and put to sea in adverse conditions.
Low-light Phone cam
Regular readers will know that I have a thing about low-light photography. My new photo-toy is the Nexus 5X and Ive the urge to push it further into the dark than it really wants to go. Yes, the wide-angle is bending the building a bit; but its getting help from the architect. #Bike2WorkPix. 1/35sec at ISO 725. I remember, all those years ago, when the original Nikon D3 came out, the first digital camera that could see just as well as you in the dark. They more or less all can, these days. Thats a little corner of the mighty Pacific.
Marlowe, RIP
Our big male cat, announced in this space in 2005, died suddenly. Bloggers cats get obituaries. Looking irritated, probably being tickled. Marlowe always had a great coat and there was a lot of cat under it; in mid-life he became obese, but when we put him on a diet and his waist re-appeared he was one damn fine-looking cat. He wasnt terribly smart or terribly affectionate. He liked the outdoors and was a pretty good rat-catcher. Hey, we live near the middle of a port city and thats a big plus. His greatest joy in life was a warm stationary lap, so he greatly approved of long TV shows.
Tender Sky Shoehorn
In which I reveal a little life-hack that can get you out your front door noticeably quicker. First, a picture. Thats a really long shoehorn. You can use it standing up, just a slight stoop even for 5'11" me. This one comes from Daiso, a Japanese 100 (think $1) store, which has embarked on world domination. Why you should do this So you dont have to tie your shoes. Slip em off when you come home then use the shoehorn to slip em back on when leaving. Now, we all knw that your Mom told you never to do this, because it would ruin your shoes; theyd get all crushed at the back.
#Bike2WorkPix
Ive been cycling to work since late last year. Its good, for me and the world. But there are more convenient alternatives, and they tempt. So heres a little incentive: #Bike2WorkPix. Consider joining in! #Bike2WorkPix: From Vancouvers Cambie St Bridge The Hashtag Its like this: You can autopilot a bike commute; but its harder than in a car. You can ignore the world too; but thats way harder. Whats easier than in a car is to stop and take a picture, and everyones got a phone in their pocket, most with good cameras. So Im gonna try and do that every day I ride, and post it somewhere tagged #Bike2WorkPix.
On the Nexus 5X
Well, the OnePlus One was a lot of phone for the money but, only a year old, is dying; the GPS has checked out and the pictures it takes look bad. I didnt feel like phone-shopping but when I did, the 5X was an easy choice. Its just fine, but only three features matter. With winter beach pix. What doesnt matter The screens great; the phones thin and light; the GPS is as good as Ive had; the LTEs fast; the OS is contemporary and fast; the battery gets though a day. And these things are true of every phone at every kiosk in every mall.
Cloud Eventing
So, I helped build Amazon CloudWatch Events (blog, AWS console), which just launched. Been a while since my last extended spell of being an actual software engineer. Shipping feels good. What it does The clouds asynchronous; changes happen when they happen. Maybe you called an API a minute ago, maybe a database failed over, maybe your app saw a traffic surge. Assuming you want to know when they happen, the traditional approach is POLL LIKE HELL. Oops, I believe the polite usage is repeatedly call Describe APIs . The idea here is for our services to broadcast Events (OK, theyre really little JSON blobs) and for you to write Rules that match events using Patterns (OK, theyre really little JSON blobs) and route em to Targets , which are often Lambda functions but can also be various kinds of queues and streams and so on.
Mobile Counter-theses
This is in response to 16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans of Andreesen Horowitz, a firm thats central to Bay Area VC culture. I think the theses are about half wrong. Ill run through his theses one-by-one. But first, I think our differences center on two things; one thats predictable given who I am, namely the cloud. The second is perhaps surprising: Whether keyboards matter. Here we go; you might want to flip back and forth a bit because I reproduce Mr Evans subtitles but not his arguments. 1: Mobile is the new central ecosystem of tech Tech is bicentric, these days: Cloud and Client.
Motorized Desk Tour
For office workers: If youre among those (relatively few now, I think) who havent had a chance to try a sit/stand desk, I totally recommend them. Heres mine, cranked up: This looks weirdly sterile because it manages to show the only wall segments of my office that arent whiteboards covered with scribbles and diagrams. Plus theres a nice little table and chairs around it. These things are becoming ubiquitous in high-tech offices. I decided to give one a try because I have occasional pain in my upper-back and neck caused by decades of looking down at laptops. Amazon gave me a consult with an ergonomist, who said its not that sitting is bad and standing is good, its that you want to avoid being in one position all the time.
Christmas Decorations
I hope that lots of you are having an excellent Christmas; I am. Heres an illustrated card featuring Vancouver Christmas visuals. We took our visiting Prairie relatives for a waterfront Christmas-eve walk, and it struck me that putting Christmas lights on barbed-wire looks dystopian by day, but is probably pretty at night. Just around the corner was a little nautical structure, and a dinghy in Christmas colors. Then Christmas came, and heres a bit of orgy-of-materialism hangover. Christmas day had the only sun of the week so between presents and turkey we took a stroll in a local hilltop park.
The Wrath of Heaven
May it afflict intermittent left-channel outages, and an audiophile neighbor who lives for operetta, on the gormless enthusiasts who maladjust the audio in the car-share cars so everything sounds like a Bad Hair Band. Modern car-audio systems are tuned by professionals to sound reasonable out of the box. Maybe you like a little more punch in the bass, good on ya. Maybe youre listening to talk radio in a staticky zone, you want to lift the mid-range and back off the treble; who could object? But what is the pervasive pathology that leaves approximately 50% of all car-share vehicles with the bass and treble cranked right up, and the fader dialed to the back-seat?
Music Nights
Been going out a bit more than usual; four nights of live music in the last month. The object of the game here is to convince a few more of you to get off the sofa and go hear people play. The entertainment was Big Sugar, Patricia Barber, Muse and a carol sing. Each was magic. Big Sugar Unless youre Canadian you probably dont know about them. Theyve never quite decided whether theyre folkies or rastas or bluesmen; have had a couple of hits over the years, you might have heard Diggin a hole. As the inset makes obvious, this picture isnt by me.
Twitter Numbers
I still think Twitters interesting; it informs me and pleases me in ways no other service comes near. Also, it lets me talk to the world, and when you do that, you find yourself asking is anyone listening? Fortunately, Twitter will tell you. The numbers are big enough that the stats might be of general interest. Of course, Social Media Professionals all have known all this stuff for years, but most of us arent those. Where the stats are On Twitter Im @timbray, so my stats are at ads.twitter.com/user/timbray/tweets (you cant see that, youll need to plug in your own handle).
One Amazon Year
December first made it a year here at Amazon Vancouvers engineering castle in the sky. Im working with good people in a cool office on interesting stuff. Its at the white-hot center of server-side computing but surprisingly unsurprising. Making vs talking It turns out that building and shipping nontrivial software is a lot harder work than evangelizing it and writing about it. I come home awfully damn tired some days. Im less engaged in the Internet conversation and miss that some, but Ive tasted more of that joy than almost anyone. And then the actual stuff Im working on making AWS more useful while keeping it reliable is so blindingly obvious that it doesnt really need evangelizing.
Game of Homes
What happened was, I got on an airplane, unexpectedly finished my book, and discovered there wasnt much else downloaded on that device. So I started re-reading what was there, namely Game of Thrones. Its hard to stop doing that once you start, and whats worse, I cant help thinking about Vancouver Real Estate. You may not have thought that our local home-selling business featured royal incest, bloody slaughter, and the frequent display of bare breasts. And well, youd be right, it doesnt. But bear with me. Sidebar: The Ice and Fire Books If you havent read these in particular if youve been watching GoT on HBO and havent you really ought to.
Long-form Reviewing
This is a love letter to an automotive review, which turns out to be one of the best applications of blogging Ive ever seen. Specifically, the Long-Term Road Test format over at Edmunds.com. Whats happening is, the 2003 Audi A4 my write-up on it was one of this blogs launch features is, well, as old as this blog. Its still a pretty nice car but has to visit the Audi doctor too often. So, were idly thinking of new wheels. Specifically, a run-about-town thingie: Smaller is better, and large fossil-fuel engines are inappropriate. Teslas are overpriced, which sort of leaves the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3.
CL XXXV: Fading
This years Cottage Life chapter is over. Not the best, either; what with my new gig and all we visited less, and the kids would as soon be in the city. Still, its a rare privilege. I could show you more mountains or birds or trees and trees and trees. Instead, lets settle for three fading hydrangea blossoms. All on the same plant on the same afternoon. This guy puts on a pretty nice show from spring through to fall and its pretty parts age then die with grace. I admire that.
Industrial Music
I just finished reading The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook, which taught me that the big hits being pumped at us via the big divas with the great thighs are mostly the output of a reproducible mechanized process, and the mechanics are Swedes. No, really. I like most kinds of music; during the decades since I first fell under the spell of blues chords and backbeats, Ive managed to ride the pop-music waves with pleasure, finding something to like in most months radio. In the car, when the song ends and the ads start, I switch presets more or less at random and regularly find something fresh and tasty.
Paywalls Dont Scale
Heres the problem: Every day I get emails about great offers expiring real soon, better act now. Theyre subscription deals from publications I mostly like, but Im not signing up. Id like to pay them though; heres how. At the moment, I subscribe (in the sense of paying regularly) to the New York Times and The Economist. Yes, Im aware thats boringly, crushingly, mainstream and sometimes I hate myself for it, but I keep on paying. Want more mainstream? The pubs I like but dont pay for include Haaretz, Beiruts Daily Star, the Financial Times, the Paris Review, the Boston Globe (if only for The Big Picture), the Mop & Pail, and the New Yorker (if only for Roger Angell).
PMs Gone Bad
PM stands for Product Manager or sometimes Program Manager; these are the people in software development who dont write code and dont manage coders and make all the difference. A good one is beyond price, and a bad one has a unique power to inflict bleeding neck wounds on what youre building. Lets illustrate this with examples from Adobe, Google, and Apple. This piece is provoked by Lightrooms abject surrender to angry users after they tried to re-work their import dialogue. From inside But lets set Lightroom aside for the nonce and start back at Google, where I saw this happen from inside.
re:Invent in Vegas
That was intense. AWSs customers are great. But I wish I could like Vegas more. Size matters There were 19,000 people, more or less, at the Venetian, up from 13K the year before. Im glad I dont own the problem of figuring out what to do next year. The way things are going you have to assume more people will want to come but Im pretty sure that hotel cant hold em. Split venue? Go for intensity over quantity and retreat to Moscone West (max capacity 5.5K) as Google and Apple have? Use one of the mega-venues? Beats me. Normally this is where Id put a picture of eager conference geeks, but this blog has seen enough of those over the years, so heres Vegas bignew Ferris Wheel instead; its impressive.
Ingress in 2015
Yes, were coming up for the third anniversary of Ingress, the game; Im one of the few from the first late-2012 wave who are still on-board. Why? Well, Ive walked 1,017km playing this game. I am at real risk of dying from boredom; in that I find most forms of exercise crushingly tedious and just wont. Ingress is excellent as a defense against sinking into an entirely sedentary lifestyle. Also, Ive met a ton of interesting people, done a chase scene and park sprint in San Fran, hoisted a few beers, braved howling waterfront windstorms, and found interesting places in Tokyo and Hawaii.
Bad Tory Craziness
Were having an election, one thats more entertaining than usual, and while our politics in Canada are in general a little saner than our southern neighbors (and our elections mercifully shorter), we shouldnt get too smug; heres the evidence. This turd showed up on my doorstep, apparently an effort to convince me to vote for the Conservative ( Tory , we say) candidate. That is, the candidate of the currently-governing party; which apparently thinks that the citizens of central Vancouver are frightened of hypothetical local jihadis, and approve of us joining other rich countries in dropping bombs on the Middle East. Notice the local candidates name?
Money and Ads on the Web
My goodness, the iOS-9 ad-blocker tech is rattling cages all over the Internet. Herewith some links, including a couple you likely havent seen, and one to a possible solution to the problem, from Google. Eric Meyer Content Blocking Primer. From which: &the entire industry is being given a do-over here. Not the ad industry; the web industry. Charlie Stross A question about the future of the world wide web. From which: &it looks like the current state of the ad-funded web is a death-spiral and a race to the bottom. Marco Arment Just doesnt feel good. From which: Ad-blocking is a kind of war a first-world, low-stakes, both-sides-are-fortunate-to-have-this-kind-of-problem war, but a war nonetheless, with damage hitting both sides. Im particularly impressed by Marcos action, because his app has instantly been replaced by lots of others.
Girls and Axes
Im talking about Rock-&-Roll as sung by charismatic young women accompanied by proficient electric guitar. I dunno if its a trend or anything, but Im hearing a lot of it and I sure like it. Some of the artists are wolves. Sidebar: Mens voices? A dozen years ago I was asking Why does everybody sound like Eddie Vedder? and while I dont terribly miss those days, I notice that at this point in this century all the interesting voices are womens, and I wonder when well have some Y-chromosome voices behind the microphones I like to listen to. Chelsea Wolfe Wow, its a couple of years since I ran across Unknown Rooms, which you can get at Amazon but I didnt, I got the full-rez bits at BandCamp and you probably should too; unless you burn for the vinyl, which you can get from her own site.
Good Zombie Fluff
Zombie, as in shambling brain-eating undead. Fluff, as in a book thats an evenings worth of page-turning. Good, as in way better than it needs to be and will leave you smiling. Im talking bout Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, which I recommend. Its hardly an obscure book; was quite popular and then theres a reasonably well-reviewed movie version. Over on GoodReads I found people who liked the movie better, and the trailer looks amusing. Tl;dr: The story is mostly told in a zombies inner dialogue (who knew they had em?) He meets The Right Girl and eats The Right Brain and big changes start to happen.
Mid-life Stark
This is a quick note on Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey, latest instalment in the excellent Sandman Slim series. KP holds its own, better than some other Sandman entries. Theres plenty of wisecracking, LA noir, colorful violence, cool steampunk magic, and disgusting villains. And explosions of imagination thatll make you smile. But also something new: Kadrey is working on a larger story arc here. I dont mean the series ridiculous-albeit-fun cartoon theology and whats happening with Hell-n-Heaven. I mean, Our Hero has grey hairs and a job and a boss and a girlfriend with a career, and on several occasions passes up booze for coffee.
Distributed Hardness
The other day this, from Mathias Verraes, got thousands of retweets. There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery. Thats really funny, but it dawns on me that it might not be obvious why. (Well, except to cloud infrastructure geeks.) Its like this: In the cloud, youd like to operate at large scale with high reliability. (Take me out and shoot me if Im ever heard uttering the phrase infinite scale unironically.) Lists Heres a list of the ways that you can munch data at a scale that is, for the purposes of most apps, unbounded: Sharding.
Inside Amazon
Gosh, it seems that my employers at-work culture is the talk of the Internet. Dont know if I should share on the topic, but I feel the urge and bloggers with the urge gotta blog. Tl;dr First: I havent seen that stuff Kantor and Streitfeld write about. Not saying that never did happen, or isnt happening somewhere, just that I havent seen it. Second: The similarities between Amazon and Google vastly outweigh the differences. Disclosures Long-ish; Sorry about this but its essential. I am an employee of Amazon. I am not a shareholder, but will be if I go on working here.
CL XXXIV: The Great Grey Room
Its been long and hot, this summer, so its easy to like Cottage-Life days that are less bright and high and blue and green. On a deck overlooking Howe Sound, the structure of the view is all curvy mountains and towering evergreens and then the separate blues of sky and sea. I love it, but recently we hosted a relative Im fond of whos been struggling with mental-health issues, who after a few hours couldnt take it and asked to leave: Too much light and space. And yeah, theres as much as anyone could take. But grey days are different. Looking over the Sound, youre in a room: Grey sea floor, grey-green mountain walls, grey cloud ceiling.
Google Music
I use iTunes at home, and otherwise Google Play music, which really isnt terrible. Since the Net is echoing with screams about Apples cloud-music problems, now might be a good time for a few words on the subject. But first, I should say that GMusic is probably only interesting if youre the kind of person who buys music sometimes; there are loads of options for people whove migrated to an all-streaming life, and I have no idea if Googles is competitive. Buy music you say?! I strongly approve of it. First, more money goes to the artist. Second, there are times when I really want to hear that particular non-mainstream track from 99 or 77 or 55, or all the tracks on that non-mainstream album.
Cranes
What happened was, Shane & Ally asked us to a rooftop barbecue with views in every direction. Most of them featured cranes, and I dont mean birds, which is not necessarily bad. Also, it would be unfair to omit the moon. Looming over us was this crane complex, not unattractive at all. If it looks kind of grainy thats because Id fat-fingered the camera into shooting at ISO6400. But the X-T1 is sufficiently resilient that this (like many other of my photo-miscues) came out OK. Which is especially true when you shoot through the stupidly-good Fuji XF35mm. But wait! There are more cranes and theyve got the mountains behind them.
Sitting down with Trudeau on C-51
A couple of months ago, ten people spent an hour sitting down with Justin Trudeau, Liberal Party leader and potentially Canadas next Prime Minister, to talk about Bill C-51, anti-terrorist legislation from Canadas Conservative government. I was one of those people, and perhaps readers might be interested in hearing about it. Sidebar: Why now? After the meeting I decided not to blog it, because I was worried about ethics; nobody had said the meeting was private but nobodyd said it was public either. Recently I mentioned this to a Liberal insider I know whod helped organize and he looked shocked: Why not?!
Meet Jude and Raziel
I recently read When Everything Feels like the Movies by Raziel Reid (A.K.A. @razielreid) and enjoyed the hell out of it. Then Raziel came to our book club meeting, which was weird but good. Sidebar: On Book Clubs I can feel the eye-rolling coming back through the Internet at me. The book-club notion had been opaque, but then I found myself exposed to my wifes because it was at our house sometimes. Seemed to center around wine and munchies and argument, with a lot of laughing. And Ive always been a bookworm, so now Ive been going for years. Anyhow, I recommend the book-club thing.
CL XXXIII: Fire and Water
Weve had week after week of blue skies and warm air; which in the green/grey Pacific Northwest begins to feel oppressive, you can almost hear the plants, great and small, whimpering for water. After a while every mornings news told of new forest fires marching up one tinder-dry mountain or another. Which lent visual drama to the July 4th weekend but I have to admit soured the Cottage-Life ambience. The fires turned from up-country news story to local color; extremely local and very colorful. Heres the night before and the July-4th morning. A variation of the next shot was picked up by multiple media including the CBC and ABC; did anyone reading this see it on any ABC outlets?
Destroyer of Sleep
I was less than 100% effective at work today, because I foolishly bought Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and August Cole, and read till 2:30AM. I just now finished it. Is it a great book? No. But its a ripping naval yarn, an old-fashioned war story. Also: Rail gun! Warning: Spoilers! But I read a few spoilers in advance and found they didnt take the edge off, much. Tl;dr A near-future China with a government somewhat different from its current regime launches a war of aggression against the U.S.A. and scores big early wins, based in part on technological excellence and also plenty of back-dooring and root-kitting.
Highlife Rocks, iTunes Sucks
I have the good fortune to live near a good record store, where I shop often. One of my best scores this year was Highlife on the Move: Selected Nigerian & Ghanaian Recordings from London & Lagos 1954-66 . On Record Stores So, there are two things you find in record stores. The first, what with vinyls resurgence, are lots of foot-square packages advertising the music they contain, often with eye-grabbing visuals. The second, almost every time, is some pretty fucking cool music on the sound system. Record stores, theyre a good thing, and lets hope we have em with us for a while.
Leaf Processing
In which I have excessive Lightroom fun with a simple photo of some leaves. This photo harvested on a visit to the VanDusen Botanical Garden, one of Vancouvers nicer things. The way it came out of the camera. Under a bright cloudy sky,the white balance (as expected from Fuji X-cams) is exact;they looked just like this. I thought the fun of the picture was mostly in the geometry, so why not try it in B&W? This is Lightrooms built-in B&W Contast High preset, the contrast softened a little with the Tone sliders, and a bit of grain for texture. But at heart Im a color kind of guy.
The New 40
June 21st this year was its longest day, also Fathers Day and my birthday. I feel vaguely guilty because I havent the slightest insight into this growing-old thing, so dont expect golden-years reportage. As above so below. 1955 You could look it up; a good birth-year geek career choice. For example Allman, Bechtolsheim, Berners-Lee, Booch, Dubinsky, Gates, Gelernter, Gosling, Jobs, Murai, Ozzie, Schmidt, and Winer. (Feeling a little humbled right about now.) Summer in the city. 2015 Ill let you in on a little secret: Making computer software full-time is a lot harder than doing it a little and writing about it a lot.
Phoenix Is Doomed
I remember my first visit, playing mini-golf in the desert in the Eighties, fountains and waterfalls everywhere, thinking these people are crazy and this place cant last. The next day we had to run like hell for the airport. Oh wait, this is a review of The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is terrific. What happened was, wed flown from Vancouver to pick up a suitcase full of magtapes (the old reel-to-reel kind you used to see on movie computers) full of source code for some behemoth mainframe thing, you couldnt possibly transfer that much data over the network.
Item: The W3C HTML Working Group charter is expiring. Item: Discussion on what to do is inconclusive. Item: Things are pretty quiet in the WhatWG. Conclusion: The best thing to do about HTML is nothing. As Sam Ruby points out, interest in work on vocabulary (by which they mean the actual anle-bracketed thingies that go into HTML) seems pretty lacking. Me, I think HTML is done. Which doesnt mean I think that the whole Web-programming platform is in a good state: (I posted this on Twitter a year or two ago.) The browser-as-a-platform is based on a lousy programming language addressing a lousy object model and using a lousy stylesheet language for visuals.
More Expanse!
I just finished reading Nemesis Games, the latest in The Expanse series by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Predictably, its fun, and if youve read this far in The Expanse well then of course youre going to read this one; but it left me a little unsatisfied. Tl;dr: While Rocinante is being fixed, Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex wend their four separate ways around the Solar System. War happens, and with a new adversary. Billions die! Bobbie is back! Holden keeps a secret! Amos has a hilarious scene with Avasarala! Other set-pieces include a bike ride across a postapocalyptic landscape and a 50-meter leap from spaceship to spaceship, sans spacesuit (not sure about the science on that one).
Online Photos
Id like to have my pictures online, and Id be willing to pay for service. Heres what I want; I dont think any of the Cloud Photo services provide it, but Id be happy to hear Im wrong. An online photo. Google gets music right I use iTunes to organize music and listen to it on the big high-end stereo at home. I use Google Music when Im in automobiles and airplanes and hotel rooms. It works great; when I get new music, whether on a shiny disk or digital download, I import it into iTunes and Gmusic auto-magically loads it into the cloud before too long.
Web Decay Graph
Ive been writing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way over a million words, 12,373 hyperlinks. Ive noticed that when something leads me back to an old piece, the links are broken disappointingly often. So I made a little graph of their decay over the last 144 months. Longer title A broad-brush approximation of URI decay focused on links selected for blogging by a Web geek with a camera, computed using a Ruby script cooked up in 45 minutes. Mind you, the script took the best part of 24 hours to run, because I was too lazy to make it run a hundred or so threads in parallel.
No Magic
I spent a couple days this week in eastern Washington State with a lot of senior Amazon engineers, all trying to discern and inscribe coherent form on the roiling surface of global-scale cloud tech. This piece is here so I can publish one pretty picture and four wise words about what it means to be an engineer. Obviously& We were in a session about a piece of software, starting to roll out internally, that might help address pain points we expect to become unbearable, assuming that AWS and Amazon grow to many times their current size. Andrew was leading; someone spoke up, asking And what if I need to do that 500,000 times a second? Andrew nodded, face creasing, then began: Obviously, theres no magic& More nods all around the room.
Internet.org
All sorts of people are denouncing Internet.org, but it looks OK to me. Maybe Im wrong. If someone convinces me that I am, then Ill update this post with an explanation of why its a bad thing, and of course link to the evidence. What it is Near as I can tell, its a service, funded by Facebook, where less-well-off people in less-developed parts of the world can get bits of the Internet for free, notably including Facebook and Wikipedia. (But I do have to say that its damn hard to find a listing of what beyond that is actually on Internet.org.)
From the Hill
Joseph Heath argued in 2001s The Efficient Society that Canadian society is about as optimal as it gets. This idea is not completely crazy, even when one loathes the gang currently in charge. This week I made a rare visit to Ottawa, took pictures, and thought about Canadian-ness. The West Wing of Parliament, currently under construction.It looked so cool at night; many pictures and only one came out. Parliament Hill is a welcoming place.Theres lots of grass out front to play catch or stretch out on. Weve had a heavy news week: a couple of provincial elections, a Guantanamo victim released, and a draconian new national-security law passed.
Car-share Economics
I finally got around to trying car-sharing, which is to say sampling the future. The CBC has a good overview of Vancouver services; I cant imagine the pricing trade-offs being that different in other markets. We signed up for Evo; its a little more expensive than the competition, but you get a 5-seat Prius with a roof rack; were a family with kids. They mostly got us with good marketing, though, offering decent starter deals through my employer and the Auto Association, from whom we already buy travel insurance and so on. The experience Ive only used it once, driving from the office to where my bike was parked at the train station.
Lightroom at the Whitecaps
Yesterday I installed Lightroom 6 and attended a Major League Soccer match, which the Whitecaps lost to D.C. United. Heres a combo review, with some Lr6-enhanced footie pix. The Whitecaps play at B.C. Place, whose roof-retracting strutsare visible just behind the traffic lights. The big difference LR6 manifests on your computer simply as Adobe Lightroom ; its predecessor was Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 . Thats about the biggest difference; the editing and saving operations look and feel more or less just the same. Those struts cast interesting shadows on B.C. Places neighbors. Marketing The Whitecaps Football Club (WFC) markets itself aggressively as The best sports atmosphere in Vancouver .
451 Again
Back in 2012, following on work by others, I submitted an Internet-draft proposing a new HTTP status code, 451, to signal legal blockage. As of today, the latest draft is a work item of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Working Group of the IETF. Doesnt mean its future is clear, but Im still happy. Im posting here to focus on one particular turn of phrase, and to ask for a specific flavor of feedback. The blog post linked in the first sentence gives the history, and a prettified version of the latest draft is here. Process The HTTP WG having adopted it just means that theyll think about it.
Trees With Names
This is the end of stories and pictures from New Zealand. Its green there; grasses and shrubs of course, but especially trees and trees and trees. Some have names; individual trees I mean, not species. Homo sapiens is an organism unique in its use of language, and language begins with naming things. Names matter, and things that have them may deserve more attention than those without. Four Sisters They are kauri trees in the Waipoua Forest. Kauris are remarkable, moderately tall and immensely massive; Laurens brother Martin has lots around his place in Auckland, and theyre pleasant company. I couldnt figure out how to get a picture of the Sisters at ground level that told the story of their bulk, but looking up somewhat suggests it.
NZ Garden Waters
Three more pretty pictures which, as I keep saying, are easy to find in New Zealand. Thanks are due to Hamilton Gardens and, surprisingly, to the Ingress community yes, that augmented-reality game that Im still playing, two years later. It hadnt been raining much, so they were spraying down this pine tree in the Japanese Garden of Contemplation. What happened was, we wanted to do some touristing south of Auckland and Lauren noticed that Hamilton was a reasonably-short drive from all the places we wanted to see, so we put up at a decent motel there. Little fountain in the English Flower Garden.
One + Four Months
Which is to say, Ive been carrying the OnePlus One since early January; a third of a year, way outside the event horizon of most mobile-device reviewers. I stand by the conclusion in my January write-up: Its a lot, really a lot, of device for the money. Herewith the history, which surprisingly stretches back to 2011; also how the O+1 has changed my mobile habits. Beet salad at Belgard Kitchen 2011 The scene: Building 44 at Google, where Android was made (at that time, dunno if it still is). A gaggle of Developer Relations ( DevRel we said) geeks on sofas, passing around the outlandish Samsung Galaxy Note.
NZ Eye Candy
I have a few more pictures I want to run and most have stories wrapped round them. These dont; except I guess the larger narrative about New Zealand being exeptionally pretty, and a nice place to visit. I suppose we could pick up and move there; the subjects come up at the dinner table. Somewhere in the west-coast-of-the-North-Island woods. The trees have leaves but arent deciduous. And the forest fills with a quality of light entirely unlike we see at 49°N. And another tree. In the far Northland I think. Which, if we did decide to change hemispheres, would be where Id want to go.
NZ Phonescapes
Turns out all the shots-worth-keeping from my phone were landscapes. So here are three. Also a pronunciation lesson for Americans. By the way, that NZ abbreviation; its perfectly OK to use it in NZ. But, dear Americans: The pronunciation is enn-zed . If you say enn-zee the Kiwis, a politer-than-average nation, probably wont call you yokel, but their thoughts will be unkind. The One+ One camera doesnt seem as good to me as my Nexus 5s was, but when you get out in the wide-open spaces with lots of sunlight and the beaches of Muriwai to shoot at, youre going to get a decent result.
NZ Birds
I dont do much wildlife, and I dont shoot animals in captivity, and I dont publish blurry pictures. Lets break all those rules. Oh, and Terry Pratchett too. Our first full day in New Zealand, Laurens brother took us to Muriwai, famous for cliffs and beaches and gannets. Gannets arent terribly beautiful or inspiring, and their colony stinks powerfully. But still, a close look at their hangout is something youre unlikely to forget. Heres a group shot; note the fluffy youngster in the middle and the grouchy seagull up at the edge. Heres a close look at a parent and child.
So, & What?
Geeks like to prefix sentences, questions and answers both, with So, & The comma stands, in speech, either for a pause, or for a drawing-out of the o . This is so common that its exceptional, in my profession, not to do it. I hear it from grey-haired pony-tailed hippie geeks, tenured authorities on graphics algorithms, and recent-immigrant colleagues where its the only confident English in the sentence. Both genders, all ages. What do you think it means? Well, I did research and harvested hypotheses. Discourse Marker In Implementing incipient actions: The discourse marker so in English conversation (PDF, 2007) Galina B.
Sinking the Annapolis
On April 4th, the Artificial Reef Society sank a navy ship; we were in the (floating) audience. Ive never seen anything like it. Heres the Annapolis, a former Canadian navy destroyer built in 1961, just prior to sinking. As the photo suggests, this is a nice little corner of the world. Its called Halkett Bay, and the view is nice whichever way you look. And as that photo suggests, boy were there ever a lot of miscellaneous boats on hand. We were rafted to a boat moored to a big barge being used by the TV cameras, and there were three more boats rafted onto us.
Narrow Road, Deep North
The last parking lot in Aotearoa: fall cyclone fluting. A few minutes walk from that last parking lot and youre at the top left corner of New Zealand: Cape Reinga. Some days, they say, you can see the Pacific oceans waters meet the Tasman seas. But I couldnt. Look right: that last headland is the Surville Cliffs, actually NZs northernmost point. Look left: There really was music in the parking lot; by a little shelter with murals, the path to the lighthouse leads through it. I was sure there had to be a hippie up on its roof playing vaguely Asian riffs on a wood-flute; then falling silent.
Mori Snapshots
The Mori people, who arrived in what they call Aotearoa in 1300 or so, have since the 1600s been sharing the islands with New Zealanders of Euro-extraction, for example my wife and children. They and their culture are definitely part of the package a tourist like myself sees and photographs. I have no information or insights to offer beyond what you can read online, so youre not going to learn anything about these people here, aside from what some of them and their works of art look like. Its interesting that they are so tourist-visible compared to my own countrys aboriginal peoples; you could easily spend a couple of weeks in Canada and your only contact would be place-names and the occasional totem pole.
Google + 1yr
As of this month, Ive been an ex-Googler for a year. Sometimes I miss it, but my rearview-mirror feelings are mixed. What I miss Most of all, the bug tracker. Any employee can file a bug against any product and be certain that someone on the engineering team will at least look at it. There are certain internal-social-engineering techniques you can use to focus attention on an issue you think isnt getting enough. Lots of bug reports are feature-requests and others are feature-removal demands, and thats fine. Given Googles global impact, that bug tracker is one of the single most powerful world-changing tools that most people will never have access to.
Auckland
I sure enjoyed visiting it but Im not sure Id want to live there. Green, maritime, rounded, not obviously scalable. With back story and of course pictures. Back story Attentive readers will have deduced from the recent cricket coverage that Ive been in New Zealand; heres why. In 1994 I met a nice software geek then living in Germany and we hit it off. Ive been married to Lauren Wood, a fifth-generation New Zealander, for a long time now, and we have two children who are also NZ citizens. Laurens family had scattered round the globe and connections had frayed; shed not been home in a long time.
That Cricket Match
I spent many hours last Tuesday in Auckland watching the Cricket World Cup semifinal between South Africa and New Zealand. It was insanely intense. I will probably spend most of Saturday night up watching the final. Herewith words and pictures, including a bit of overview for us New-Worlders to whom cricket is (mostly) foreign. How I got there Back in January, an Aussie friend told us that the CWC would be on while we were visiting New Zealand. I checked, and impulse-bought tickets for a semifinal. I had no idea how big a deal this would be. Some of the 45,000-strong crowd.
RFC 7493: The I-JSON Message Format
The Olde ASCII is at rfc7493.txt. Ill put a nicely-formatted HTML version here as soon as I pull a few pieces together. This is really, really simple stuff and should be about as controversy-free as an RFC can be. Back story Basically, RFC 7159 is the JSON RFC ; it describes the existing panoply of JSON specs, and also more-or-less unifies the (small) incompatibilities between them. The history is here, from which I quote: If youre interested, I recommend opening up the HTML version and searching forward for the string interop . There are 17 occurrences. If youre generating JSON something a lot of us do all the time and make sure you avoid the mistakes highlighted in those 17 places, youre very unlikely to cause pain or breakage in software thats receiving it.
The Only Sane Transit Vote
Vancouver is having a Transportation & Transit Referendum this spring: Yes or No on a 0.5% local sales-tax hike to pay for transit infrastructure, mostly public-transit train lines. The only sane vote is Yes; heres why. Strong bones Vancouvers a child among cities. As Doug Coupland (I think it was him) said: In 100 years, Paris will still be Paris and Tokyo will still be Tokyo. What will Vancouver be? Nobody knows. Growing children need strong bones, and thats what the votes about. Voting Yes: Its buying milk for your kids, and making them drink it before they go out to play.
At Work
More reportage from inside the AWS factory. Looking for leaks or marketing? Nope. Seems Ive been here three months. It still feels weird to dig in and work on software without breaking frequently to explain it to the world. The main current project is stretching some envelopes so my explain-it energy is finding plenty of internal outlets. News flash! One of the things you get at any big tech company is an onboarding task ; a little product feature or bugfix, the kind of thing that would take a person who knows the software and toolset about fifteen minutes. It took me a week and small change, learning how to check code out and build it and stage it and so on.
Catching Trees
Recently, I wrote this about the Fujifilm 10-24mm ultra-wide lens: Im finding it hard to get comfy with. What I really need to do is go out for a couple of photowalks with just this puppy and force myself to see the kind of picture it wants to take. Here are some of those. Warning: Heavily-processed photos ahead. The street where I live is blessed with a variety of trees, including a few really big ones. Today we had a clear blue spring sky and it set them off nicely. With this kind of a lens you can stand right in front of a big tree and snap away.
RFC 7464, JSON Text Sequences
Heres a nice little RFC describing a nice little trick that might even be useful. Short form: People like to write JSON into logfiles. Text sequences make reading them easier and more robust. The trick You precede each JSON log entry with little-known Unicode character U+001E INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO, and you stuck a newline (0xA) after it. This makes it easy to pick the byte stream apart into chunks you can hand your friendly local JSON parser, and cleanly survive the not-terribly-uncommon scenario where something blew chunks while logging and left behind a truncated/malformed entry. Im not going to reproduce the RFCs explanation; its perfectly transparent.
35mm Seasonals
Just possibly I may have already touched here on the excellence of the Fujifilm 35mm F1.4 prime lens. This is just more of that, with illustrative late-winter/early-spring shots. This time of year it gets dark early. If you wait for good light to shoot, you wont get much. Or any light, actually. The world is full of photographic subjects, but all the most interesting ones are faces. This is my friend Michelle. Whats better than one face? A whole choir-load! Got a little lucky with the light here, but give the lens credit too. And then there was February sun! I was zoned in on these backlit roseleaves and then when I was processing the pic I kept having the feeling that the background was the foreground.
Zoom! Zoom!
In recent days Ive bought two new Fujifilm lenses. The choices werent easy and Im far from convinced I did the right thing. Have a look and see what you think. 10-24 Back before Christmas I bought the (take a deep breath, official name here) Fujinon XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS Wide Angle Zoom Lens. It was sort of on impulse; new job, Christmas coming, felt in the mood for a toy, stumbled across a great deal in a local camera shop. By way of background, its one of the few Fujinons thats outside the focal range of the two lenses I originally picked up back in March 2013, the 18-55mm and the 35mm F1.4.
5k: The Köln Concert
What happened was, I was gonna make the traditional Sunday-morning pancakes and bacon and, as I do every other week or so, told the eight-year-old to turn the damn cartoons off already because I wanted music. I threw the ancient vinyl of The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett on the turntable and all these years later, I kept having to stop making pancakes because Keith had grabbed me where you have to listen when they grab you there. The Context Wikipedia has the story, dating from January 24, 1975 (wow, 40 years ago). Its an interesting story and this sort of thing has happened more than once: Famous players, adverse conditions, fantastic result.
Silly Java Strings
Being a hyper-pedantic note about turning bytes into Java strings and a small fix for a smaller and almost-purely-aesthetic but ubiquitous problem. [Update: Heavily revised with a better solution.] [Most of the comments below apply to the original solution Id been using, which turned out to be sub-optimal.] So, its like this: Youve received some bytes over the wire and run them through a JSON parser and youre looking at a few of them that you know damn well are a field name in UTF-8. So, you say: final String name = new String(bytes); Then your perfectly sensible reviewer points out that its a Best Practice to call the constructor with the charsetName argument because otherwise itll use the platforms default charset .
#ActualGameplayFootage
Good heavens, I started writing about Ingress in 2012, but havent since last July. Yeah, I still play, not obsessively but regularly. Im a greybeard so my bodys in use-it-or-lose-it territory, and as of today Ive walked 766 kilometres playing this game. Also, its enriched my life; see here and especially these pictures. But mostly, check that hashtag in my title; the thing is, I like to go outside and see things. #ActualGameplayFootage, looking out over Howe Sound. Operation Creek Slide What happened was, Resistance agent Ba1r0g got this idea for a nice big field two of whose three anchors would be way off the beaten track in places with little or no cell data, requiring cool network-engineering techniques, of which agents @Whydahlabtech and @NeddLudd have a rare command.
Text Editors for Freedom
The press coverage says Court Orders IRS to Release Computer-Readable Charity Tax Forms. Theres this guy Carl Malamud who runs Resource.org, which is in the business of making public legal materials actually public. What, you exclaim, Public legal filings arent already public?! Nope, not unless citizens can get full-text versions for free. This is the story of how I helped Carl (in a small way) to stick a small wedge into a wall of really stupid public-sector resistance to openness. Theres this law in America called 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(B) ( E-FOIA ) that says (if I understand correctly) that nonprofits tax filings should be public, but that they dont have to disclose who their donors are.
Super Stifado
My Super Bowl Stew has become a tradition, so I should share it. With some tech magic too. What happened was, eight years ago Prince played the Superbowl and I made a Stifado for guests, a Greek version of a fairly straightforward beef (or rabbit) stew distinguished by heavy oregano. I got the idea from a fellow-employees piece on the late lamented blogs.sun.com. I later refined the recipe with ideas from another foodie site, also now vanished, A Spoonful of Sugar (I think), dedicated to stews and suchlike. Anyhow, this morning two miracles happened; I was poking around the Internet not liking any of the Stifado recipes, when Lauren suggested looking in the Wayback Machine, and there it is: Beef Stifado by Paul Humphreys.
Tools!
Im in the unaccustomed position of spending all my work time either writing software or in meetings about it. The current project is conventional big-system server-side Java. Thats not a landscape that anyones gonna wax lyrical over, but boy, have the tools ever come along while I was off Androiding and Go-ing and Rubying. IntelliJ and Git work together smooth as silk; I reflexively drop into a shell now & then to reassure myself with a git status but near as I can tell the IDE is just Doing The Right Thing. Also, YourKit shreds through sluggish code, shining the ruthless light of truth on that bad method.
The Crocuses of 2015
Theyre traditional in this space this time of year, representing the first day Im at home and its not too cold and theres some light. Nobodys ever complained about me running more or less the same pictures early every late winter. As always, theyre lovely in purple and gold. This year they carry along stories about old books and global warming. Weve had a couple of dim weeks; its not the lashings of rain that hurt, its the low grim grey ceiling and the photon shortage. But suddenly this weekend the air is mild, the car claiming 16°C outside. Casting my eyes back at previous years crocuses, I note the (kind of funny) 2011 piece is dated in early March not late January.
Children in Combat
Theres strife in every family. The kids faction is at a terrible disadvantage in strength and wisdom, so they have to fight sneaky. The analogy with guerrilla war is obvious, which gives me a chance to mix up family life and a book review. Its like this A lot of what parents say to kids is unwelcome, whether positive ( Do your homework , Eat your salad ) or negative ( Dont hit your brother , Stop throwing the noodles ). So, for a kid who doesnt want to eat the salad and does want to throw the noodles, theres really no upside in listening to grown-ups.
At Work
No, Im not going to become an Amazon Blogger (that territory is well-covered) but I have at-work stories, neither leaks nor marketing. Point form: My first job out of school was with Digital, the worlds then-second-biggest computer vendor. Now Im back in the biz. Yes, I think of AWS as, effectively, a computer vendor; my third such employer, including Sun. (I remember vividly, in that first job, the convoluted, high-contact process, back then, of speccing and selling and delivering computers; quotes could run to hundreds of pages and invoices to a dozen.) The groups around me where I sit include SQS, SWF, and Autoscaling.
OnePlus One
What happened was, the teenager smashed his phone, so we did the usual shuffle-and-hand-me-down. My only real constraint was No Nexus ; been doing that long enough. I was pretty interested in the waterproof Sony Z3, or maybe a small phone since I usually carry an N7 too, or maybe one of those lovely silken-metal HTC thingies. But neither the carrier nor Google had any very good deals, and the O+1 is a very good deal. So now Im carrying one. Size matters I think I can claim a leading-edge voice on this subject, as an early adopter and fan of the original Samsung Galaxy Tab.
End of 2014
As the year winds down Im mostly cheery about my slice of life, though distressed by much of what I see looking outside it. There are cheery-side pictures here. Somewhere on the Trans-Canada near the Rogers pass. Same spot, less photo-glamor. Both of these are the new 10-24. Here are things that will happen this first week of 2015: People will kill others because of devotion to supernatural entities. Were there a benevolent deity, he or she would manifest double-quick and say Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Thou. Shalt. Not. Kill. OK? But there isnt, as any fool can plainly see.
Twitter News
Good news and bad news; but mostly bad. Its a playground for abusers and managements pointing the wrong way. Good news Kathy Sierra, one of the good smart people who make Life Online interesting, was chased off the Net by shitheads in 2007, then came back strong via Twitter, offering a refined mix of words and pictures. But then, earlier this year, it happened again. Because shes a woman with opinions. Which draws abuse. In her case, including from Weev (now theres an asswipes asswipe). To make it worse, the Twitter account she folded was insta-grabbed by an abuser and used as a club to beat her.
More Cheap Lens Fun
On the weekend, I took candid photos of friends in soft indoor evening light. The best lens for this sort of thing, speaking as a member of the Fujifilm cult, would be the awesome portrait-optimized 56mm F1.2, which has reduced many reviewers to quivering jelly. I didnt have one of those but the pix are still OK. My friends Michelle and Philip That 56mm is the kind of lens Id totally buy, except for I was at Leos Cameras and accidentally bought a used smc PENTAX-M 1:1.4 50mm instead, for (I think) $75. Manufactured between 1977 and 1984, its easy to screw onto my A.D.
Closed Eyes, $45
I took my daughter for a walk down the Main, and we happened by a funky consignment shop. I cant decide whether that second one is sad or not.
Amazonian
As of December Im working for Amazon. This will be different from my last few gigs; in particular, dont expect to read about it here. The preaching and coding around privacy and security Ive been doing these last few months has been a blast, but it doesnt seem to be a paying job nor even a coherent organized project, the kind with co-workers. And Amazon is offering me one of those, so here I am with a smile on my face. What I will and wont be doing Ill be working on AWS. And thats all Im saying, because this isnt an outward-facing job; for the first time in oh-so-long, Im back in the full-time engineering trenches.
Practical Time Travel
I just finished reading William Gibsons The Peripheral for the second time, and I recommend you do too: Read it twice, I mean. Gibsons always written densely; idiomatic, with good flow, but its really packed in. I remember decades ago, talking over the Sprawl books with my brother: Early on, he said, you have no idea whats going on. What with that, and beauty of the words, and the interesting people in the stories, and the big set-pieces& well, Ive never read any Gibson just once. But I left out the biggest deal with his books: the backgrounds, the flavors, the astonishing skill at mise en scène.
Defending The Mockingjay
I saw Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday and, having carefully avoided reviews, poked around afterward to see what other people thought. I was shocked to find them running more or less 50% negative. So heres why you should ignore the bad reviews and go see it. The gripes The critics seem to think that splitting the third Hunger Games book in two is a brazen cash grab, that the movie is dark and fashion-starved, and that theres not enough action. Why theyre wrong Because Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, and Philip Seymour Hoffman are all at the top of their games and theyve got a decent script to work with and if you like movies at all, why wouldnt you want to watch that?
Reviving my Mac Pro
Weve had this Early 2008 Mac Pro since, well, early 2008. Itd been showing its age but I fixed that. Long-time readers may recall the occasion when in 2008 I asked the Net whether I should hack this computer; with a hacksaw, I mean. Or perhaps its 2012 life-extension therapy. Its the family mainframe, does homework and Plexus and BitTorrent (legal stuff only, you betcha) and drives the big high-end audio system through a Benchmark Media DAC1 USB, also its my 15-year-olds gamebox, which means theres a BootCamp Win7 partition in there. How to I was encouraged by Bob Lees Six ways to breathe new life into an old Mac Pro, and Bobs was even older than mine.
Keybase Client
I got interested in Keybase.io the day I left Google in March, and Ive been evangelizing it, but even more the idea behind it: Using authenticated posts here and there to prove public-key ownership. Also Ive contributed Keybase-client code to OpenKeychain (lets just say OKC ), a pretty good Android crypto app. Im more or less done now. This report is too long, and will probably be of interest only to the twelve people in the world who care about crypto implementations, key discovery, and modern Android apps. What it does There are now three screencasts over on YouTube: Sending a message, Receiving a message, and Can I trust this key?
The Dock at Gibsons
Gibsons is mostly another strip-mall-along-the-highway town, but includes Gibsons Landing , a nice albeit touristy place mostly famous for starring in a Canadian TV show that peoples grandparents liked. Its got a big useful public dock we say government wharf round here which looks really good in mid-November slanting sun. None of the names for the town or any part of it seem to use apostrophes; I guess this makes sign-painters lives easier. Photogeek note: Its really hard to take that old (I mean really; its scratched and dented and looks old) 35mm prime off the camera.
How To Be Secret
Suppose you need to exchange messages with someone and you need to be really, really sure that nobody else reads them. Heres how Id do it. Background To keep this simple, lets call the person youre trying to communicate with Elvis , and the people wanting to invade your privacy The Firm . This discussion assumes: Neither you nor Elvis are a high-value target, for example Ed Snowden or a big-time weapon smuggler. You have a trustworthy device. For most of us a personal computer, properly set up, is acceptable. In my opinion, the same is generally true of modern mobile devices.
Vancouver Election
It happens Saturday, November 15th, 2014. Heres how Im voting. Theres one vote for mayor, a bunch for council, a bunch for Park Board, and another bunch for School Board. Im not voting a full slate; Im only voting for people I have feelings about. This is called plumping ; I believe psephologists say it increases the power of your vote. Mayor: Gregor Robertson Ive heard Meena Wong speak a couple of times and shes probably closer to me politically, but Gregor Robertson gets my vote anyhow; heres why: Its actually close, and Im unimpressed with Kirk Lapointe. This guys highest life achievement is middle management in the newspaper business famous for being badly run and his big idea is counterflow lanes.
R and G and J
I just read Adam Jacobs Rust and Go, comparing two new hotnesses. Me, Ive been (unaccustomedly) working the last few months in a familiar codebase/toolset, on an Android app; so I thought Id and an &and Java. Is Java boring? Android is the only place where Java isnt boring. The big back-end systems at Google and the other Net giants are the only other places where new Java code might change your life; and most developers arent writing those. Interesting new server-side code is in Node and Go and Rails and Erlang and so on. Maybe Rust too, soon. Mobile apps are still interesting, and half of them, more or less, are Android/Java things.
Security Problems
The Internet is a dangerous place. We have tools to make it safer, but they go unloved and unused; by ordinary people I mean, the ones who arent geeks. How can we fix that? Lets look through some recent evidence; The conclusion is pretty obvious. Two-factor More generally, multi-factor : Sign-in with more than one piece of evidence. You may have noticed that pretty well any bank in the world will give you cash money when presented with a piece of plastic and a 4-digit number. OK, these days the plastic has an embedded chip, but still. Two-factor is great! Put yourself in the bad guys shoes; not only does he have to steal or guess your password, hes got to get his hands on something you carry around.
Ten MOA Faces
On a recent rainy weekend I took my daughter to MOA, the UBC Museum of Anthropology. I think its maybe Vancouvers single best tourist attraction, and we have plenty of those. The shelves are crowded with objects made by the hands of Homo Sapiens and many of those objects are heads. Here are ten of them. This is in the European Ceramics gallery; not usually my favorite bit of MOA. East-European, 17th-century I think. From the really wonderful Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art exhebition, only running till November 2nd. This is part of the monumental The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid.
Catching Faces
Point-and-shoot cameras advertise Face Recognition , a cheap trick that a Serious Photographer using a Real Camera with a Fast Prime Lens would never go near. Oh, wait. What happened was At goto; Aarhus the big first-night party was 007-themed , which gave everyone with flashy duds an excuse to wear them. People were looking good and I wanted to take portraits; it was dim in that room, so I was using a prime lens jammed wide-open. Heres what Fujifilm calls Face detection at work. Kresten Krab Thorup, conference organizer, Erjang guy, smart. Nicky Plant, a beauty therapist with secret desireto be a Bond villainess.
Gamergate and Bullying
Ive been watching the Gamergate brouhaha with sick fascination. We all know the Internets got ugly corners and suddenly the ugliness came out of the corner. I honor the courage of the women whove been standing up to the creeps. But I was kinda puzzled by who the creeps actually are and why theyre so upset; I know lots of heavy gamers and theyre by and large pleasant well-adjusted people. So I went looking for them. [Disclosure: Im not 100% unbiased: I once spent a couple years in online games. Also, I like Android car-racing games. Also, Im an L11 Ingress agent; L12 soon!]
Vancouver Photowalk
October 11th was World Photowalk Day. I attended the Vancouver edition, which was in a place Id never go looking for pictures; but I got some anyhow. We started at the Convention Centre and walked to Gastown, which is to say through Vancouvers maximal white-hot tourist density, where you dont need to be on a photowalk to be pointing a camera at everything. Which is why normally I wouldnt take my camera there. But you know, going somewhere to take pictures puts your eyes in looking-for-pictures mode. Which isnt my default; I normally lean back in my skull, waiting for something I see to exhort the camera out of the bag.
Making Android Crypto-friendly
Google could tweak Android, in a pretty simple way, and make it immensely easier for anyone, not just geeks, to do cryptography with a nice user experience. All the pieces are there ready to go. [Note: I posted this first over on Google+ because I was trying to reach the Android group, and theres some useful discussion. But I thought I should replicate it here where I can stretch out a bit and show examples. Some of the material here assumes you know Android-API basics.] If you look at my screencasts showing off sending and receiving an encrypted message using the OpenKeychain Android app, youll notice they share an irritant: The stupid useless-to-humans encrypted text is visible; it looks like this: -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org hQIMAwkuBalYH40qAQ/+J5NzcRNBdhcfipIzDal4cFEgvtfjFLvrEHMaWZn51h5m EceX+ittkZNwOsDcTacyp2dnIzduqjShFN9Um7eLdkc1G1zENyyvasreB5G2IIMn IRBCBxPC0nfnFpk+M/KrUCU3yl3oiBebtSwbIKhXsO9ujcWWp5x8uOfM4NcROKVa HibbtE6YI+t0oZc9+BvidkiCQIZnwbG7Vojg8cNgXQXaFHLYsIS5dXQwVcfG5g4P fI8qTcFtWNe6x4C3gE25Ztt5xim9JGOrYDpP1jy3FOKfVv7kp9qSz3+69cEFZLG3 1J7hznY4HxHiv0J+TtNtZvPNPs1zq4KDwtZxPA7/qCsayFYBGF2ivw6d6kPOuZZV E0kMHfSVSygSIkd2FAeLfVWCdPQaWvJr/diahu0+B1Bg6xmt7uqPccaiZ043Kmf3 q/KLADE5e9FDLVs6rOSfwnR7szDUxCUWQBxCzLTH6aZKQSzf3LG/nJkSUOrWUXiO eHRcujIgjsXDRS8KyVCLMdpcd4za3ndcGxcHbH8eIEik1GjmyoxMYRxIAOw7Cqj0 STLFqHmB0pXKhx23iUrKC0+ivAOVpMEtbjWxeEE1HkV8u5sNkA9d4OHyjuoMLpaW aa0rsD6LTRF2lsEMtSM5WBHbeplMYinv7fPnFGjM19flc5loFX6SuhnfUxOJ5D3S SQFdX9omfQWrmGnI/8zv9/z4zkRswv0pD6qGepFaTrcFTieHnnieYogH7E3/n0eW UIFZkbw/3thlwZ4b6uwDro/26y5ovCayB80= =9CtG -----END PGP ...
Is Encrypting Phones OK?
Starting now, more and more phones will have their data encrypted, so nobody but the phones owner can peek. Apple just started and Androids following suit. Now we hear howls of outrage from government officials claiming this will protect criminals, doom victims, and so on. But theyre completely wrong. The pushback A particularly shrill shriek came from former FBI Assistant Director Ronald T. Hosko in the Washington Post. I could disagree with him here, but instead Ill point you at the essential Marcy Wheeler; in Former FBI Assistant Director Makes a Compelling Case to Eliminate the Corporation she pretty well reduces him to quivering blobs of protoplasm.
Kathys Gone Again
I mean Kathy Sierra, on the Web at seriouspony.com, in Wikipedia, and formerly on Twitter; but as of now @SeriousPony is gone. Heres why. Over the years shes had loads of smart, eloquent things to say about Java and tech education and community-building and, in general, Life Online. Recently, Ive been entranced by the awesome Icelandic-pony pix that used to be on that tweetstream. So Im sad. There was a kerfuffle on Twitter saying Kathy had been forced offline by misogynist trolls. Which would be shocking, because its happened before, her primary attacker back then being Weev, always a troll, now with a brand-new Swastika tattoo.
Mitchells Marinus Books
Mitchell as in David Mitchell who wrote Cloud Atlas. Books as in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks, which Ive spent an unreasonable number of hours reading this last month. Marinus is a character in both. They are huge, beautifully written novels that will take you places you never could imagine and introduce you to people youll never forget. Theyre also kind of flawed and sloppy; but youll have a hard time finding a better read among recent publications. Thousand Autumns Its the turn of the nineteenth century in Dejima, the Dutch trading-post in Nagasaki harbor that Imperial Japan just barely tolerated for a couple of hundred years starting in 1643.
Lake Leaves
Herewith two pictures of leafy branches dipping into Sankt Jørgens Sø, one of what in English are called The Lakes in Copenhagen. This is at the northeast, near where Vester Søgade crosses Gyldenløvesgade. (OK, I admit it, I love typing Ø even though I cant pronounce it). The two pictures are almost identical, and to be honest werent that interesting the way they came out of the camera. But I decided to try injecting postprocessing drama and enjoyed what I got. You have to look pretty closely to tell which of the leaves and branches are seen in reflection. Heres the other treatment; admittedly a little extreme.
Mac + Android = Screencast
If you want to show off your Android goodies and you have a Mac, its absurdly easy to make a decent-quality screencast; the tooling will cost you $29.99. I made a couple for my recent Open Keychain 3 piece; you can see them on YouTube, Sending a message with OpenKeychain and Receiving a message with OpenKeychain. If you need better production values than that, stop reading now and go elsewhere. Tl;dr (for experts) Buy QuickTime Pro from Apple. Grab the screen with adb shell screenrecord and the audio with QuickTime. Use QuickTime 7s Edit/Add to Movie thing to paste the audio onto the video.
Nine of Denmark
I spent a week in Denmark, doing conferences and of course taking pictures. Its not the most visually dramatic place but you can find good shots anywhere when youre in tourist mode with fresh eyes. Its really hard to arrive in Copenhagen without going through the Central Station, which is very efficient. Its not a standout among Europes steel-and-glass train temples, but theyre all fun to look at. The city is kinda flat and grey and sensible; but theres water everywhere and you gotta love that. The goto; conference ran twice; Thursday-Friday in Copenhagen and then Monday-Tuesday in Aarhus; more or less the same speakers.
OpenKeychain 3
Release 3.0 of the OpenKeychain Android app is out today. Im super-proud to have been a (minor) contributor. Its getting pretty slick, if I say so myself; maybe almost civilian-ready. Read on for an explanation, with screencasts and geek notes too! What it does Your mobile device comes with a lot of different ways to exchange messages with other people over the Net. OpenKeychain can do three things: Encrypt the messages, so only the The Right Person can read them. Sign them, so that The Right Person knows who sent them. Decrypt them for The Right Person to read, while checking the signature.
Computer Love
I havent always been Apples friend in this space, but this is just a note to say that my current MacBook Pro is by a wide margin my best computer ever. Also, tugboat pictures. Why share? Ive made intense professional use of computers for three decades plus. Im a connoisseur, if anyone is. If a computer makes me happy, its gonna make you happy. Everyone should share their expertise. Why tugboats? Because we went to the Vancouver Tugboat Festival and Im looking for an excuse to run pix and otherwise this is going to be a dreary wall of text. Tugboats are great!
Equinox Close-ups
Our record-setting summer at one level was sobering (although I was cheered by the Climate Change March stories) but now kiss it goodbye. The sun came out and as it got low I went stalking flowers. This is a rose of some sort I think. The bee I think represents the first insect ever presented here. I have a visceral horror of arthropods and always glance away from other peoples bug macros. But this guy was so soft and benevolent-looking I managed to put it aside. A hydrangea; it was a pure uniform baby-blue in midsummer. Confession: I used the Fujifilm Velvia treatment to make it prettier.
Missing the Cloud
Im working on my speeches for the Goto conferences later this month, in Copenhagen and Århus, and Im using Keynote, and its the first time in a long time that my work lives primarily just on this physical computer in front of me, and its making me nervous and unhappy. News flash: along with the is-the-browser-done-for keynote, Im going to do a tech talk on the privacy/crypto stuff Ive been fooling with since leaving Google. But that means two different 45-minute talks. Other things I work on: My blog, which has two lives, on my laptop and at tbray.org; sync is ultra-low-tech via scp, but whatever.
Apples Privacy Policy
See A message from Tim Cook and especially Government Information Requests. Its good; well-written and clear. Plus, theres a news story; as of iOS 8, Apple cant unlock a random iPhone. Mind you, this is also an Apple marketing piece. Grumblers I hear a certain amount of grumbling along the lines of Its a bunch of lies, Snowden said PRISM is pulling the goodies straight outta the servers. Also, Encryption is useless because a determined adversary will route around it. Im pretty sure both those arguments are crap. While nobody can know 100% for sure, its increasingly looking like the claims in those PRISM Powerpoints were, um, a little inflated.
Life Changed Much?
Occasionally, new technology changes lives. But mostly it doesnt. Im a greybeard and (like most people I think) the number of qualitative tech-driven shifts in my life fits on the fingers on one hand. How about you? Ground rules Lets keep it to this century. Which assumes the Internet, email, and some flavor of real-time chat; theyre part of civilizations background radiation, these days. Even so, my list of changes will extend further back than most peoples. Im pretty mainstream in most respects, but to the extent Im not, my list might be unrepresentative. So: My life is not automobile-centric, I almost never watch movies, and Im a bookworm; I think that about covers it.
Keys in the Cloud
I just landed a nifty new feature for OpenKeychain. Its simple enough: If you want to communicate privately with someone, you need their key. So, just like when youre looking for anything else, you type their name or email or whatever into a search box and find it on the Internet. Heres how it looks Suppose I want to communicate with Dominik Schürmann; hes the lead author of OpenKeychain and a good example because of his long hard-to-type name. I start entering his name in the search box. Since hes is in my Android contacts, I can pick him from the drop-down and not type much.
Styling More Pixels, with Beards
Our cameras put more pixels in each picture than our computers screens can display. But the screens are catching up, doing smart things with pixels so small you cant see em; Apple says Retina , but everyone who ships things with screens is going that way. Publishing pictures on the Web so they look as good as they possibly on whatever whoevers looking is carrying& well, its hard. But Im working on it. Heres my latest attempt if youre in a feed-reader, drop by the tbray.org version to see what Im talking about a picture of my friend Peter, who has one of the best beards ever.
CL XXXII: Listen to the Trees
On the forest-walks part of Cottage Life, a problem is that the kids chatter and squabble. So I tell them, Shut up and listen to what the trees are saying. They think its just Dad being silly, but I keep insisting that if they listen for that, theyll learn things. And Im right, they will. I think I may hang that one on a wall somewhere. Anyhow, trees may not actually be talking to you, but its obvious at a glance that theyre talking to each other.
A Word on NFC
The Applepalooza today banged the payments drum pretty hard. I dunno, payments are difficult. I had a close-up view of Googles struggles with Checkout and then Wallet, and Google has way more server-side culture and expertise; so Im not holding my breath. But NFC could be a really big deal. Refresher NFC is like RFID only weaker and more constrained; it basically doesnt work unless the two NFC devices are basically right up against each other. This is a feature you cant use it without establishing intimate contact. Its cheap! There are all sorts of NFC variations, passive and active, secure and insecure, but the cheapest, passive devices that come on rolls like tape and emit a URL or other small static data when touched, can be bought in huge quantities at vanishingly small cost.
Gear VR Video Software
Heres a little look behind the scenes on the Samsung Gear VR launch; you might want to start with the nice Engadget write-up. A lot of their demos are videos you can look around in, which (it turns out) involves software from Immersive Media, a company Ive been talking to; theyre headquartered in Western Canada near me. It turns out they have an API and you can have 3-D video in your apps, with or without the Samsung headset. Immersive has been doing 3-D cameras for a decade. They were involved in Google Street View, and have participated in lots of ads and other high-glamor apps.
Women Speaking
I just finished reading Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny. And while it makes me nervous as hell to write about gender issues, silence seems less acceptable every day. Meta meta meta I hadnt read much by Ms Penny but can also recommend Why I Write, a terrific piece of writing on writing with a little sidetrip into writing about writing on writing, even. If it looks a little long, theres a crystalline excerpt at laurie-penny.com; but do read the whole thing if you think of yourself as a writer. Nervous, you say? Well, yeah. When it comes to gender and feminism and power relationships and so on, there is no shortage of opinions from hyper-entitled white men (want an example?)
Jack White Show Notes
My fifteen-year-old and I attended the August 28, 2014 show at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. Its a terrific venue; a big lawn with a nicely-steep slope so you can see over the mosh pit. If youre not a Jack White fan you can stop reading, but if you are, this is a tour you should catch. My notes on the event, in no particular order, with better pictures than I can take: Its not a terribly long set just under two hours but wow, is there ever a lot of music jammed in. Heres the set-list; I didnt take notes so there were noteworthy moments where I cant remember the song they were in.
Jack White Recordings
Im off to see Jack White play an outdoor concert tonight, so I revisited his last couple of outings, Blunderbuss (which is great) and Lazaretto (which is pretty good). But watch your media! Blunderbuss Its loaded with terrific songs: I particularly like Love Interruption, Im Shakin, and I Guess I Should Go To Sleep. On top of which, a few of them are straight-ahead rockers, and any year which has one of those from Jack White in it cant be all bad. Lazaretto The proportion of winners isnt as high, except for theres Temporary Ground, a totally beautiful sad little ballad, one of the best songs of the year by anyone.
CL XXXI: Forest Light
Our Cottage Life happens on an island mostly covered by temperate rainforest. Not old-growth (thats hard to come by these days); but logged a hundred years back, so the trees are big. Such forests have qualities of light that make me happy but are hard to photograph. This is about as close as Ive come. The undergrowth is usually pretty thick, but there is the occasional glade. Most trees are evergreen: Cedar, Fir, Hemlock. But here and there youll see a Bigleaf Maple; perhaps my favorite among all trees. Their size is remarkable and their leaves catch that forest like like no others.
Flamenco Snapshots
Recently, several times per week Ive been spending an hour or two biking. Usually after supper, with Ingress as a motivator. My route home goes by a Flamenco bar; and its absurdly easy to counteract the biking benefits with a couple of Guinesses while I watch the last set. And take pictures. The Kino Café is, to be honest, kind of a dump, and I hope the dancers are pursuing this as a hobby not a profession; the way it works is, theres no cover, but after each set the prettiest among them goes around with a little basket, which gets pretty full of folding money when the bars full, and doesnt when its not.
On Pancakes
Sometime in 2004 I started making traditional Sunday breakfasts, featuring pancakes and bacon; and never stopped, so theres a tenth anniversary coming up. Ive learned enough about them now to offer tips both on them, and on what you put on them. Which matters, because pancakes, un-topped, are kind of boring. Mix it up. As in, try different mixes, both noveau-organic and traditional-home-style. The differences are surprising. Maple syrup! Normally everyone buys Canada #1 but health-food stores will have other options; some of the darker shades with numbers that arent 1 have deliciously smoky flavors. Most mixes and recipes have a lot of baking powder aimed at giving you big thick fluffy pancakes.
Saint Hilda
Also known as Hilda of Whitby; shes the protagonist of Hild, by Nicola Griffith, which I just read and enjoyed hugely. Only I didnt know Hild was Hilda while I was reading it. What happened was, Charlie Stross had Ms Griffith on as a guest-blogger, and she posted Who Owns SF? which led me to an impulse buy. Its an odd, long, first-person book, with a different sort of rhythm. I was going to write not much happens but since its full of religion and sex and politics and war and commerce that would be crazy. What I think I mean is, you spend the whole book inside Hilds head and she doesnt change much as the years and battles and faiths and lovers pass.
The Moon With No Mirror
What happened was, we came home late and there was that Supermoon beaming through the trees. So I screwed the big ol 400mm Tokina onto the Fujifilm camera and got a pretty decent picture even though there was quite a bit of haze. Its so much easier when youre not using an SLR. Ive done this before, with a 2007-vintage Pentax DSLR and a zoom stretched to 210mm. But it was hard, involving guesswork; and a lot of Lightrooming. With an EVF its just no pain. Since I dont have a tripod mount for the big lens, I decided I better shoot pretty fast.
Legal Advice
Hey, are you operating an app or a Web site? If so, are you among the (large number of) people (for example, Instagram) who connect via http: instead of https: ? Heres some advice. Set up a meeting with someone on the Legal side, and get them to sign off. Explain to them like this: Were offering our service in whats called plain-text mode , which means that someone with a WiFi sniffer, or employees of our ISP, or overseas hackers, or the NSA, or the local cops near where our servers are, or where our customers PCs and phones are, can see what our users are sending us and what were sending them.
Got Yer Space Opera Right Here
I refer to Cibola Burn, the latest from James S.A. Corey . Im going to quote myself on Space Opera from a 2013 piece that highlighted Coreys Expanse series, of which this is #4: Gleaming silver ingots of engineering poetry reaching up out of gravitys mud carrying humanitys sparks into spaces blackness... and blowing each other up! Well, yeah; this is like that; and if you like that sort of thing, youll like this. Our Story: A plucky band of hardscrabble homesteaders stake out a piece of the rugged (interstellar) frontier and then a big resource-extraction operation starts showing up to brush them aside and begin extracting.
On Hating T-Mobile
If you are a visitor to the USA, you can expect TMO to be stupid and abusive. Background Youre visiting America. You probably do this more than once per year. You need Internet. Youre willing to pay for it. In certain countries (my experience is with the UK, Spain, and Germany) you can buy a reasonably-priced SIM in or near the airport. For example, there are vending machines at Heathrow where £20 will get you one thats good for a week or two. These SIMs, of course, dont care in the slightest what kind of device you put them in. The good part For a visitor, TMO offers prepaid plans that are not-bad-at-all; a few bucks a day for enough data.
CL XXX: Lensing
The great thing about interchangeable-lens cameras is well, interchanging lenses. In particular while kicking back in Cottage-life mode. Fujifilm X-T1 + 400mm I already wrote about getting a Fotodiox PK-FX adapter, and finally couldnt resist clamping on the antique Tokina SL-400 F5.6 onto my Fujifilm X-T1. The combo looks absolutely ridiculous. Its perfectly hand-wieldable without a tripod, by the way. It lets you take arty stuff like this: Those are big mountains in the background. But I think the design goal is this sort of thing, a half-grown eaglet in its nest. His or her parents visit regularly to supply food; these occasions are accompanied by much screaming and flapping.
OSCON Rear-view
I spent three days last week at OSCON 2014 and enjoyed it. Im not actually sure what OSCON means any more, but I hope it finds a way to stay vital. There are a lot of good software conferences these days; many of the best are dedicated to a particular technology. Python/Ruby/Go folks, and the various database tribes, have a selection of annuals and regionals, while if youre a JavaScript weenie (browser or Node flavor) there are events most weeks. But somehow none of those feel important; if you want your tech meetup to have actual cultural impact you need a broader focus, a theme, something that captures imaginations.
Privacy Economics
Privacy is good. Perfect privacy is really hard, probably unachievable. Its not a binary thing, but a big dial we can turn up or down. So obviously, we should be turning it up. The economics Its like this. If theres data flowing over the Net that the intelligence community can scoop up for free, they will, and theyll store it forever. Criminals and stalkers will scoop too, looking for credit-card numbers and home addresses and so on. But the Internet volume is so high that if it processing a conversation takes any non-zero investment of effort or money, then spooks and crooks wont bother (unless youre a real target); nobody can afford X multiplied by billions/day, no matter how small X is.
Festival Firetruck
There was a party in the local park; food-stands, music, a movie. We picnicked there with family and friends. And a firetruck came! Did I say music? I mean Vancouvers Carnival Band, ubiquitous at any sort of public event; theyre fun to listen to and look at, too. It was a fine event, kids charged everywhere while grownups relaxed on lawn-chairs, and we felt OK about bailing at sunset and skipping The Lego Movie. There are a lot of things to like about Vancouver. At many public events, the Fire Department rolls up, mostly to entertain the kids. Well, and me, I just love taking pictures of the trucks.
Vegetation
Pictures of people are better than pictures of plants, but the plants hold still and dont worry about how theyre going to come across. Actually Im trying to figure out how to use depth-of-field, but these are a decent side-effect of that study. The thing is, the X-T1 has the greatest viewfinder ever and it makes me brave about stupid things like pointing a wide-open F1.4 lens at a complex 3-D tangle of stems. Granted, it almost never works; clearly, more practice needed.
Joyful Screams
Heres a photo of children screaming. Care to take a guess what its about, and is about to happen? Try a look at the full-size version. Its a self-defense lesson. The kids are being taught that when theyre scared of someone, they face them, they back up, they keep one leg back so they cant be knocked over easily, they keep their hands up, and they scream like hell. First Stop! then Youre frightening me! and finally, if everyones ignoring another loud kid: FIRE! You cant imagine how much the kids love this drill. Im not 100% sure why, but being praised for howling (louder is better) is one bit, and playing a threatening-adult game seems to go deep.
Discouraged Developer
Im a software guy; I like writing code. Over the last decade, my niche has been a modest amount of coding and a lot of writing about it. The size of my audience suggests that this is a reasonably useful combination. But Im kind of discouraged and stuck at the moment. Ill get over it, but the storys worth sharing. I have some sympathy with Ed Finklers The Developer's Dystopian Future (read the commentary from Marco Arment) and I hope to avoid going where Matt Gemmell has gone; see Confessions of an ex-developer. Matt has decided to become a novelist; I scratch my writing itch in smaller pieces, but I have to say hes eloquent.
Hangouts to Slack
I chat with people on all sorts of different online channels; I guess Im sort of a connoisseur. Since I dont have a work team these days, the only big group chat that consumes any time at all is my local Ingress faction community. Its been on Google+ Hangouts for over a year, but they just moved over to Slack. G+ Hangouts are great Because they keep track, globally, of what Ive seen on all my screens and devices, and are very good at only showing me whats new. No real-time channel Id ever used got that quite right before. G+ runs everything over HTTPS and your communication is pretty private.
Ingress Tips for iOS-folk
Well, it looks like the client has dropped. Welcome iDevicers to our private party! OK, not so private, there are a million or so of us around the planet. Im a regular-but-not-obsessive player, and have been since 2012; if youre playing in the Vancouver area, Ill probably meet you in-game, which quite likely means F2F. The first time this happens I want a demo of the app. I expect a huge influx of people learning the ropes, so here are some intensely-experience-based tips. Im not gonna say a word about how to play the game; there are loads of places to go for tips.
2014 World Cup The Last Lap
I caught one semifinal in a pub and were having friends over for The Big Game. Which feels like the right way to do it. Thats the good news; then there were the semifinals. Brazil 1 Germany 7 Astonishing, but everyones already said so. The what is pretty easy: Brazils defense just wasnt there. On that very first goal, a well-taken corner: Müller ditches his mark and is standing free in front of a third of the goalmouth, right where the balls coming down. Well-run defenses dont let that happen. The Germans mightve been just a touch lucky on one or two of the next two or three, but its the kind of luck that happens when the backs arent where theyre supposed to be.
Blow up the Cert Business
Check out Maintaining digital certificate security by Adam Langley over on the Google Online Security blog. Bad certs in the wild, many Windows users (but not on Firefox) vulnerable. This is very, very bad. Let me elaborate a bit and explain how Google could solve this problem. Digital certificates (everyone says certs ) are a key ingredient in making the Web secure enough that you can use it for banking and buying things. You need one if you want to operate a web address starting with https: . You buy them from a certificate authority (everyone says CA ). Fortunately, theyre cheap and reliable and pretty easy to use.
Color Victim
Im almost ashamed to admit it, but Ive been enjoying a Twitter stream called Every Hex Color; every ten minutes or so it posts a 24-bit random number which expresses a red/green/blue color value. Ive long been fascinated by the mapping between the numeric RGB space and what our eye/mind system constructs on consciousness stage. Longtime readers may remember a small exploration I did called RGB Planes. Of course, the math and science behind color are horribly, sickeningly complex, and I dont pretend to deep understanding. For those who do, properly appreciating this feed probably requires a conscious effort to ignore all that stuff.
Marketing Gone Bad
In this months Harvard Business Review, The Content Marketing Revolution smells like concentrated essence of evil; an unironic paean to the take-over of journalism, and public conversation, by marketeers. I recommend reading it, if only for shock value; here are a couple of out-takes for flavor. Brands are no longer merely peddling products; theyre producing, unearthing, and distributing information. And because they do, the corporation becomes not just economically important to society, but intellectually essential as well. Just a sec, be right back. Sorry, had to make an unexpected run for the loo there; hate it when that happens. Lets try again.
2014 World Cup The Quarters
All the favorites won. [Sobs.] Also, the tournament has never got back to the high-scoring fast-running energy of the Group Stage. Lets hope it ends with a bang. Me blogging the World Cup for a mostly-tech mostly-norteamericano audience has felt a bit like bringing dispatches from a foreign country. But at this point chances are that many of you actually watched the games Im writing about. Does that change anything? France 0 Germany 1 A fair result, I suppose. One thing nobody else seems to have pointed out is that this was a triumph of conditioning; in the last 20 minutes or so the French play became ragged and choppy; there were no real slashing attacks or Neuer game-savers.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Mr Cave is touring at the moment; the current Bad Seeds incarnation is a six-piece notably including Warren Ellis; (No, not that Warren). I dont go to a lot of concerts; a few each year. I caught this tour Tuesday and it was the most involving, intense music Ive experienced in years. If theyre coming near, you should go see them. Assuming you dont mind really loud really dark music about serious things: fear and love and murder and sex and God. An establishing shot, taken on the concert halls balcony. Its dark, just like the music. At a Bad Seeds show, you hear wonderful songs; the set list featured two from my fave Cave, 1994s Let Love In; Red Right Hand made my blood run cold.
2014 World Cup Down to 8
All the teams that were supposed to advance have, and mostly without any surprises. The round of 16 hasnt been as much fun as the first phase, but things are looking up. Europe vs Africa Frances defeat of Nigeria was fair, although it didnt win them many friends. Theyre totally the kind of team that could win the World Cup without actually exciting anyone. I loved the Nigerians pace and courage, but they just didnt have the finishing quality to score against one of those deadening ironclad Eurodefenses. I suppose Germanys advance was fair-ish, too, and theyre obviously a contender to take it all.
World Cup 2014 We Know Four
Four of the sixteen are in, four more out. Lots of drama even if some of the football was a little stinky. Brazil and Colombia So the hosts got (just barely) past Chile. At this point, Ill honestly be surprised if they get past Colombia, and if they do, theyll be crushed by whichever of France or Germany emerges from that side of the bracket. Neymar and Oscar? They arent, and the defense is frankly porous. I suppose the results qualitatively fair in that neither team really dominated the other, but I felt awfully bad for Chile. And the shootout itself was sort of lacklustre, what with shots wide of the goal and straight at the keeper.
DisplayPort vs HDMI on OS X
Recently I wrote about plugging a Samsung U28D590D 4K display into my late-model 15" MacBook Pro. Decent performance, easy setup. It was reporting 30fps, which is OK for programming, but Sheldon McGee a.k.a. @tooshel said that Id get 60fps via DisplayPort, and pointed me at video evidence. So I tried, and heres the data. This is OS X 10.9.3 on a MacBookPro11,3 i.e. late-2013 15" model. There are three possible configurations: Standalone laptop, Laptop/outboard via HDMI, Laptop/outboard via DisplayPort. For the latter to work, I had to buy a DP-to-mini-DP adapter; the Mac then reported the display as running at 60 Hz.
World Cup Tools
Ive managed to take advantage of my between-gigs status to watch just over half of the World Cup matches. To satisfy my curiosity, I regularly needed answers to two questions: What are the group standings? and Whats on today? Youd think that FIFA.com would be the place to find them, but youd be wrong. To figure out whats on, Im using this web calendar from Britains Sky Sports, which plonks the matches, timezone-corrected, right into the Google calendar I look at 20 times a day. Pleasingly, its auto-updating the playoff fixtures as the group standings settle down. To understand the group statuses, I do a Google Search for world cup standings ; this puts the Group A status at the top of the results window and gives you a one-click link to see all eight groups.
2014 World Cup Round of 16
Nobody would say the tournament format is perfect but, based on the first-round play, its hard to find teams that should have been in but are out, or vice versa. When the biggest injustice is Greece instead of Côte dIvoire, thats not terrible. The exits of Spain, Italy, England, and Portugal are surprises, but Id say the bigger story in 2014 is the ascendency of Latin-American football. Brazil-Chile The hosts are heavily favored, but Brazil just hasnt, to my eye, really showed the brilliance Ive seen from certain other teams. Their goal differential (+5) is tied for fourth (Netherlands & Colombia at +7, France +6, Germany +5).
Java Security Hole
Good solid cryptography is an essential foundation for sound business usage of the Internet, and essential to provide a sane privacy level. But the tools for Java programmers are in horrible shape. OpenPGP The crypto landscape is wide and disorderly, but in the area I most care about, private messaging, OpenPGP is central. RFC 4880 gives pretty crisp and clean coverage of how it works. So what we need are nice clean OpenPGP tools for Java-heads. OpenPGP describes public/private key formats and what signed/encrypted messages look like. So there are four or less inputs to any PGP process: The key, the plaintext (to be encrypted and/or signed), the encrypted text (to be decrypted), and the signature (to be checked).
Constructs
Photographic subjects can be sorted into any number of mental baskets. Mine are, more or less: People, Nature, and Human Constructs. The objects in the first two baskets are curved, mostly; but those Constructs are mostly about line segments, the angles they meet at, and the surfaces between them. Here are three examples. Two are Vancouver, one Keats Island. Okay, some Nature snuck into a couple.
ART and Dalvik
The Android avalanche today at IO included an announcement that Android L will use a new default runtime called ART. This is really a pretty big deal, that is if youre an application-runtime geek. Since Androids launch in 2008, the app runtime has been Dalvik, which is a story that never got the attention it deserved. Its a novel register-based VM, not like Javas at all, but whose bytecodes could be generated from Javas with reasonable efficiency. A fully garbage-collected and (starting in 2011 or so) JITted VM, pretty power-efficient, and pretty fast. But never quite as power-efficient or fast as iOS apps, compiled from ObjC to ARM-native code; perhaps no classic VM ever could be.
2014 World Cup The Horror
I refer to the events of today, June 24th. The Beautiful Game , they say; only sometimes not. Italy 0 Uruguay 1 Yeah, Italy deserved to lose. But yeah, Suarez bit that guy. Id have been cheering for Colombia next round, whoever won. Heres the thing: Italy hasnt quite got over 2006, when they won the World Cup with their ironclad defense anchored by the incomparable Cannavaro, who Im convinced single-handedly beat Germany and went through the tournament without a red or yellow card. This years team was not quite as good, a whole lot nastier, and that defensive-lockdown mode was truly ugly.
CL XXIX: Biryani
What happened was, my family signed me up for an Indian-cooking class. On Thursday Nasreen taught us Chicken Biryani and so I thought I might try to enrich early-2014 Cottage Life with it. Biryani, well, its complicated. This versions payload featured chicken, peas, yogurt, potatoes, onions, and loads of spices (there are variations including excellent veggie choices). Then build up layers of rice, payload, caramelized onions, sliced peppers, and pour some magic over them. Nasreens recipe described it as a lively, multitasking dish and yeah, its not the kind of thing youre going to whip up on impulse at short notice.
More Old Glass, with Eagle
Well, it had to be tried: Can you strap an antique 400mm F5.6 Tokina telephoto on a state-of-the-art modern mirrorless, as in the Fujifilm X-T1? Why, yes! Yes, you can. And an eagle might drop by. The family cried The eagles down at the dock! Miraculously, after I ran in, got out the camera, got out the lens, put the adapter on the lens, and put the combo on the camera, he still was. Hes scruffy and wet because he wants dinner, which involves splashing into the briny Pacific. Hes standing on an old wooden arch thingie on our dock, which I guess is a nice vantage point: We saw him take a couple of tries, coming up empty.
Java Pain
In 2014, its not OK if its hard for a developer to run a simple program from the command line. I wrote some code to connect Keybase and OpenKeychain, and plan to write more. Since its in an Android app the code was in Java and it occurred to me that since (so they say) other people use Java too, those people might be able to use it, so Im working on that. But it shouldnt be so hard. I had the Java code already working and in production, so I copied it out of OpenKeychain and made a new project and wanted a smoke test which I thought I ought to be able to run from the command line.
2014 World Cup Days 8 and 9
Well, weve seen all the teams now, so Im going to back off and only write about the games that matter, where by matter I mean I watched and didnt bore me . So, is this the year of Latin America or what? Colombia 2 Côte d'Ivoire 1 It was fair, the Colombians are the real deal and the Ivoiriens just werent there yet, even though Gervinhos goal was maybe the best solo-effort score in the tournament so far. There are now like 5 Latin-American teams that you have to think are a threat to any team on any day. Among other things, in two games Colombia has a total of one goal against.
2014 World Cup Day 7
Today marked the tournaments first exits, notably including the champs. Things are starting to take shape. Australia 2 Netherlands 3 Good on the Aussies for making a game of it! I was working with the match on an outboard computer screen, initially not giving it much attention, but saw both Robbens one-man run and Cahills one-foot one-timer. Good football! When the Australians got ahead of the Dutch, it reminded me of what they used to say back in the Joe Montana days: If youre up on the 49ers by a touchdown, its tied; if youre up by a field goal, youre behind. And so it was.
2014 World Cup Day 6
Now weve seen all the teams. Also, it was goalkeepers day! Belgium 2 Algeria 1 Well, except for this first match. I confess to drifting away from it about halftime. The Algerians were ineffectual (even on that penalty, it was far from clear that Feghouli was going to score), the Belgians were boring, and the keepers were surplus to requirements. I eventually started watching again and was paying attention for Mertens go-ahead goal, the result of a thunderous high-velocity attacking run. So why didnt they do any of that stuff during the first 80 minutes? Often football strategies escape me. Whats a little saddening here is that Group H is really soft, so either of these yawners could end up being mincemeat for a good team in the round of 16.
2014 World Cup Day 5
Ouf, those Portuguese. Germany 4 Portugal 0 Readers who followed my commentary on the last two World Cups know that I have an attitude problem about Portugal, because whenever I watch them it seems like theres a whole lot of hacking and diving. Theres a word for that: Cheating. And hey, the New Yorker found someone with the numbers: Portugal tied for the cheating lead in 2010 (with Chile and Italy); Ronaldo was third overall among individuals. Which is to say, this result was OK by me. Both the initial penalty shot and the red card were fair calls. I stopped watching around halftime because really, who needed it.
2014 World Cup Day 4
It time for tactlessness: Some of these teams shouldnt be here. Switzerland 2 Ecuador 1 Didnt catch it. One of these guys might even make it out of group phase; then theyll get mangled instantly and unemorably. So, why are they here? Im not sure what the right number of teams for the World Cup tournament is, but the quality of some of these matches is evidence that 32 is too high. France 3 Honduras 0 I watched some but then wandered off. Neither side was putting a world-class show, which is what the World Cup is supposed to be about.
2014 World Cup Day 3
Nobody could possibly watch all the games, even people between jobs like me. This was pointed out by my 8-year-old who wanted the TV, so I told her the story of how she was born the day before the 2006 World Cup started, which is why I ended up watching lots of it even though it was coming in from Europe at weird times: Paternity leave plus a newborns sleep/wake schedule. But she persisted in her (losing) argument for a switchover to Bugs Bunny. Colombia 3 Greece 0 Really, the least engaging game of the tournament so far. Colombia had some flashes of speed and precision, but from Greece more or less nothing; you cant attack at a walking pace.
2014 World Cup Day 2
Give the Brazilians credit, the playing surfaces held up remarkably under the heavy rain. So did the quality of play, mostly. Mexico 1 Cameroon 0 I tend to know and like Mexico because theyre often the big dog in the pool Canada plays in; and Ive thought that one of these years they should be able to win it all. On the other hand Im an unabashed fan of joyous run-and-gun African soccer. Anyhow, Mexico may do well this year, but today wasnt evidence; Cameroon was entirely lacking in cohesion and discipline. The execrable-again refereeing robbed Dos Santos of two pretty good chances; 3-0 would have been a fairer reflection of the result.
2014 World Cup Day 1
There were no broadcast breakdowns or stadium collapses or other disasters (aside from the refereeing); congrats to the Brazilians for getting this thing launched smoothly (aside from the football). Up here in Canada, it seems all the games are on CBC, who have the usual competent laid-back Brit announcers. The guys who call the Whitecaps games on the Vancouver radio station are way more fun. Not sure what CBC will do when there are parallel matches. Brazil 3 Croatia 1 There were only two clean goals. I include Croatias first, called an own-goal, but that was a lethal cross from Olic; if Marcelo hadnt touched it there was another red-checked shirt right behind him facing an open goalmouth.
Trusting Browser Code
It would be useful if you could really trust code running in your browser. Its not obvious that this is possible; but its not obvious that it isnt, either. Google just announced End-to-End, OpenPGP code, destined for life as a Chrome extension that might add Strong Privacy to your Gmail life. Similarly, Keybase offers a slick in-the-browser encrypt/decrypt/sign experience. Both of these do encryption in JavaScript. If this can be made useful and safe, itll be amazingly useful in extending privacy to everyone. But maybe it cant. There are two classes of reasons people dont want to trust browser-based crypto: political problems and technical problems.
More Funky-lens fun
I previously wrote about sticking a groovy 100mm F/2.8 tele/macro Pentax lens on my Fujifilm X-T1; here are a few leftover pictures with no unifying theme, but theyre pretty. There are fancier flowers than a daisy, but few more fetching; my Mom scandalized her early-Fifties wedding planners by insisting on carrying them as a bride. Ive commented on how great the X-T1s manual-focus aids are, even with the mismatched lens. Let me walk that back a bit, because Ive been having trouble with shots at any distance; perhaps the adapter getting in the way? But for anything nearby it gets up and sings, for example like this: Focus on the ferns, then on the ferns behind the ferns.
MacBook Pro + Samsung U28D590D
When I got 10.9.3, display on the ancient Dell 30" Id had plugged into various Macs went south; It would only do 1080x1920, which looked like a bad cartoon. So I ended up with a Sammy U28D590D which is advertised as UHD which I think is the official term for 4K. It works really well, albeit at 30Hz, but that doesnt seem to be a problem. Back story What happened was, I tweeted So, whats a good 4K outboard monitor to get for my MBP? Where by good I include cheap . and a couple people tweeted back about this Sammy, and local dealer NCIX had em in stock at a fair price, so I placed the order.
Camera Combo Fun
What happened was, I got an adapter and slapped a Pentax 100mm Telephoto-Macro on my Fujifilm X-T1, leading to a ridiculous amount of fun. Herewith pictures of irises, flamenco, and a muscle car; and of course the baroque camera/lens combo. But there are things to watch out for. For those with a short attention span: Fujifilm X-cam shooters might want to run out and buy this lens (but there are cheaper alternatives) and an PK-to-FX adapter (but not the one I bought). I have lots of Pentax lenses, but without hesitation I slapped on the D-FA 100mm f2.8 because whats not to like about a prime mid-telephoto with MACRO written in big letters on the side?
Where Is Your Data Safe?
You can store it on a USB stick or your mobile or your personal computer or your company servers or out there in the cloud. Where is it safe? Thats not a simple question, but heres my answer: Your own personal computer, if you take a few basic precautions, can be a pretty safe place to store things that matter, including secrets that matter. Lets assume Concerning the Personal Computer Im talking about: You bought it yourself, from its maker. You havent let anybody, in particular your employers IT group, install anything on it. The chances of an employer installing spyware, whether through policy or incompetence, are high.
What Programmers Do
I contributed a morsel of code, connective tissue linking two moderately-popular pieces of publicly-available software. The technology and culture that enable this? Theyre the water and computer programmers are the fish, we cant see it any more. By an accident of history I could this time; and want to write about it. Sidebar: For non-geeks Whenever youre sitting in front of a computer or fiddling with your mobile, youre interacting with software. How that software gets built, and the culture out of which it rises, are processes that affect your life; just like the tech and culture and people that manage airline schedules and commute-route closures and TV programming.
Privacy Levels
You should be able to exchange messages privately using the Internet. My profession should be working on making this easy for everyone, including non-geek civilians who dont shouldnt need to understand cryptography. Ive been thinking about this a lot and even slinging little bits & pieces of code; before I write any more, I think itd be helpful to define terms. So lets start with a question: How private do you want to be? There are three obvious levels, which Ill call Basic, Common, and Strong. Basic Privacy We can all agree that we want privacy from random strangers sniffing WiFi signals, from crooks looking for bank account numbers, and from agents of the Chinese government looking for dirt on dissidents.
Chinese Garden, Right Side Up
Earlier, in Chinese Garden Reflections I ran some pictures of greenery reflected in the ponds of Vancouvers Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Here are are more photos, unreflected. The first three of the five are in the public (free) part of the garden. Did I mention that its a really nice place to visit?
Night Food
I mean at the Richmond Night Market. Richmond is a suburb of Vancouver noted for flatness, Chinese-ness, and the airport. I gather night markets are a big deal in the great Asian cities, so why not Richmond? Its in big parking lot in an empty corner near the airport, traversed by the Canada-Line elevated tracks. There are lots of retail establishments, mostly selling cheap-n-cheerful junk; the main attraction was the food: Cheap and cheerful, yes, but not junk at all. The people who cook and sell it, they work hard. I had some chicken and beef barbecue sticks, Lauren had squid-in-a-cup with loads of garlic, the little girl had cinnamon mini-bagels and a mango smoothie.
Pistils and Stamens Oh My
Being four photographs of the insides of rhododendron blossoms featuring the sex organs named in the title. Some of the color is extraordinary. Those flower parts are kind of hard to photograph because theyre long and sticking out at you, so you need some depth-of-field to keep them in focus, but when youre shooting flowers you usually want as little as possible DoF so as to make the subject stand out. The Fujifilm X-T1 has all sorts of focus aids and Im slowly starting to get a feel for them.
Nautical-maintenance Mac
There are three silver Mac laptops in our household and sometimes its not obvious which is which. Also, while at Google I got used to the notion that laptops shouldnt be left naked. So I shopped around online and ordered a cover from DecalGirl. This is the picture I used. Its Doug McCallums workshop; he runs Blue Ocean Yacht Services here in Vancouver and fixes up our boat once a year. I thought there were a few things about the workshop that suggested what was under the cover inside the computer. Putting the decal on requires a steady hand and cool nerves; mine is just slightly not straight, which irritates the hell out of me but is entirely invisible to the casual observer.
Chinese Garden Reflections
While my Mom was visiting, she and I went to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, and boy did we ever take a lot of pictures. These three are different; Upside-down actually, reflected in the gardens many ponds. Theres a free part and a (not particularly cheap) paid-admission part; the first two shots here are in the first. For anyone visiting Vancouver, I totally recommend the Garden; its small, easy to take in, and beautiful in a unique way. Also, there are lots of funky entertaining stores in that part of Old Chinatown.
Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack
Thats the title of RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for Best Common Practice ); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor peoples use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This monitoring is an attack and designers of Internet protocols must work to mitigate it. Concretely, quoting from the RFC (PM stands for Pervasive Monitoring): Those developing IETF specifications need to be able to describe how they have considered PM, and, if the attack is relevant to the work to be published, be able to justify related design decisions. The back story Since the pervasive-surveillance story broke in June 2013, its reasonable to wonder why the IETF is putting this stake in the ground in May of 2014.
Teaching Glass
Teaching, as in I have a Visiting-Professor gig this summer at the Centre for Digital Media. Glass as in Google Glass; Im advising a group trying to drive an interactive documentary (someone said walkumentary ) with wearable tech. There are six grad students with expertise in programming, animation, photography, film, and audio, and theyve got fourteen weeks to see what they can make. Should be fun. The team Wenguang, Jessie, Cindy, Dan, Rob, and Valerie. Theyre not dummies. They have a blog already, Aperture; check out their not-rosy-at-all first impressions of walking around wearing Glass. The picture apparently illustrates the Hand shading technique .
That Oracle-Google Appeal
Im actually not that upset. The decision may or may not stand, so nobody on either side should either overcelebrate or rend their garments in anguish. And even if APIs are copyrightable, maybe thats not so terrible. But I think the OSS community just picked up a new to-do item. [Disclosure: While working at Google, I worked with the attorneys on certain aspects of this case, and was deposed by Oracle. I am not the slightest bit neutral in this dispute.] Might not stand? I read most of the Federal Circuit Appeals Court judgment and boy, the law around this is clear as mud.
Old Spring Lilies
Lily-pads, to be exact. Last years, in this years May. I loved the geometry; and I think these are the only pictures in years Ive consciously taken with B&W in mind; the pads were yellow and diseased-looking.
Yellow Film Treatments
One of the nifty features of the Fujifilm X cameras is a set of filters that try to capture the color flavors of their famous film products from days of yore: Astia, Provia, Velvia, and so on. But this is for JPEGs and I shoot raw, so Id pretty well ignored them. Recently, the filters got added to Adobe Lightroom, so I thought Id try them out. [Disclosure: Back in the film days I shot Kodachrome, mostly.] Heres our subject, a graceful tulip in Vancouvers Queen Elizabeth Park. This rendition is what you get by default when Lightroom sucks in Fuji raw files, called Adobe Standard .
Fat JSON
Most server-side APIs these days are JSON-over-HTTP. Developers are generally comfy with this, but I notice when I look at the JSON that its often, uh, whats the tactful term these days? Lets say generously proportioned . And I see clumsy code being written to walk through it. The options for dealing with this are interesting. For example Ive been working with keybase.io recently; when you talk to their directory through their API, an entry is represented by a User Object, which is not exactly lightweight; heres part of one which may be retrieved here. { "status": { "code": 0, "name": "OK" }, "guest_id": "05a8fdd28c23a5d5dc2c2f588c3e7b08", "them": { "id": "922d9f5ffd96b34b9133483091738a00", "basics": { "username": "timbray", "ctime": 1395088335, "mtime": 1395088335, "id_version": 9, "track_version": 11, ...
Tulip Aperture
Most photographers know about Bokeh. Herewith a couple of blossom renditions that I hope illuminate the subject, which is not that simple. The pictures are effectively identical, except for the first is F5.6, the second F1.4 (shutter speeds 1/250 and 1/2900 respectively). For those new to the subject Bokeh is photo jargon for when everything in the picture is out of focus, except for the subject. Things that encourage it include using a wide aperture (when the F-stop number is, say, 2.8 or below), using a longer lens (although these shots show that 35mm is good enough), and having a larger sensor.
Security Farce
There were these headlines yesterday, for example in CNET, about a serious security flaw in OAuth & OpenID, with garish graphics claiming that Google and Facebook and Yahoo and, well, every other website you ever heard of was vulnerable. Ive been digging a bit and I still dont know if theres a there there; at the moment, I think not. But I was left nauseated by the amateur-hour flavor of the reporting. The Heartbleed Connection Heartbleed turned up earlier this spring, it was serious and scary and easily demonstrable and easy to understand; it had a cool name and a snazzy Web site with an eye-grabbing logo, and boy, did it get the worlds attention.
Pink and Blue
I have a new camera and its spring. Which is to say, if you dislike botanical photos you should avert your eyes from this blog for the next little while. The (many) photogeeks among you can consider this sequence as in part a meditation on early-2014 issues in photography and inevitably, I suppose, an extended review of the Fujifilm X-T1. This one is remarkable in having had exactly zero postprocessing; I confess to routine fairly-heavy photomanipulation, in part just because I enjoy doing it. But these are the bits that came out of the camera, except for I cropped away some superfluous grass and sidewalk.
iPad Photography
My Mom is visiting and Ive been taking advantage of my unemployment to tour her around some of Vancouvers tourist spots. Where you find tourists, taking pictures. With everything from fancy high-end cameras to iPads. Yes, people do use tablets as cameras. But... only women. I have no explanation for the unsubtle gender bias. [Update: Over on Twitter, I got vigorous pushback on the gender bias; many report seeing lots of men do this. Vancouver thing? Also, a suggestion of age bias: Mostly older rather than younger people. [The world is complicated.]] And once you get over the shock of seeing people waving these things around, it starts to make sense: as in, What You See Is What You Get.
On Piketty on Capital
Thomas Pikettys Capital in the Twenty-First Century may well be the most important economics book published this century; or maybe just the most important book. Its physical version is sold out. I just finished it, and while its been reviewed to death (by Nobel-Prize winners, forsooth), I havent heard any Net-head or software-geek voices. And there are angles there our tribe should pay attention to. What does it say? Oh gosh, read one of those other reviews. Better still, read the damn book already. Really. What... still want to know? Well, it addresses issues like How much wealth is there? and How is it distributed? and How has this trended over history? and Is the present like the past? Piketty introduces interesting metrics for the economy as a whole, for example r, the average rate of return on wealth (farmland, urban real-estate, financial instruments).
Advising Auth0
You can find them at Auth0.com. As of now Im serving on their Advisory Board. Its not an actual job but yes, I do have a financial interest in their success, so you should take that into account when you read what I write. Why Auth0? Well, having spent a couple of years advocating back and forth between Google and the developer community around Identity issues, Ive become keenly aware of how under-served that community is. Modern identity tech is getting to the point where its irresponsible not to be deploying it; but the devil is in the details, and boy are there ever a lot of details.
New Fujifilm
I just picked up a new Fujifilm X-T1. Its about the most-reviewed camera in recent history and theres very little I can add to that tsunami of words; so this is short. The pictures here were taken at a high-school-student written/directed/performed musical that my son was mixed up in. He can be spotted if you know what he looks like (hint: Not like me at all). I used the advanced technique of slapping the 35mm F/1.4 on the camera, setting everything on automatic, and pressing the shutter button. The X-T1 is great for this kind of thing; you can turn off the back screen and shoot with the eyepiece exclusively, so no glow-in-the-dark, and the shutter noise is silky, hardly audible.
Blossoms
Its spring. I have a garden, a camera, and a blog. What more need be said? This is our second year with this baby cherry tree. It has a scattering of blossoms; will there be fruit? Stay tuned. The tulips are just a bit past their peak, but still reward contemplation, the closer-up the better. Hm, Im not actually sure what this is and its actually not a wonderful picture, but I was charmed by the web. Of all the springy things each spring, the springiest is the fern eruption.
Popular Cryptography
Its like this: Everybody ought to be able to use strong cryptography any time theyre going to send anything to anybody. Ideally it should just happen, by default, but lets take baby steps. This is a messy rambling work diary on trying to put some of the pieces together to make that a little more practical than it is today. Sorry, this isnt introductory. Maybe when a few more pieces of the solution are in place Ill be able to write a painless Heres how you can do secure messaging piece. Lets assume you know what public-key encryption is and how Web APIs and Android apps work, and go from there.
CL XXVIII: Bigger Glass
We did an opening-up overnighter; another year of Cottage Life has begun! Attentive readers will have noticed that Ive become a Fujifilm fanboi, but at the cabin Im still a proud Pentaxian, because my longest Fuji lens only goes to 55mm and things on the island are further away. So lets see what you can do with bigger glass. First of all, you can point the mighty Pentax DA* 50-135 f/2.8 (which, objectively speaking, is still probably the best lens Ive ever owned) at sharp-looking boats. Another option is to wait for the sun to get low I find that a bottle of good white wine helps then prop a ridiculous antique like the Tokina SL-400 f5.6 on your knee and point it at faraway objects, large and small.
Twenty-first Century Home Repair
What happened was, a horrible windstorm took a big branch off the neighbors maple; it reduced one of our eavestroughs to scrap metal on the way down. Getting it fixed was (surprisingly) Net-mediated and pain-free. I say surprisingly because every homeowner knows the pain of dealing with residential construction/repair contractors. Theyre hard to reach, they tend not to show up on schedule, their interest in your job is inversely proportional to its size, and theyre relentless upsellers: Fix that gutter? Im not sure its worthwhile, why dont we put in new gutters all around and hey, itd be a good time to re-do the roof while were up there! I looked up a couple rain-mitigation businesses online and called them both on a Thursday.
Solving Fujifilms Problem
I got this new camera from Fujifilm; its outstanding, but has a really irritating software problem. Fuji could fix that on the double-quick and at the same time turn the problem into a marketing weapon. How? Two words: Open source. The camera is the X-T1, which has been reviewed to death, for example here and here and here, and is in short-supply, back-ordered at Amazon and everywhere else. Photo credit: Nexus 5. The problem Ill probably write more about the camera, but today I want to focus on its wireless features, of which there are three: You can remote-control the camera from a mobile device.
Spring on the Main
Which is to say on Vancouvers Main Street, never actually been Main as such and isnt as cool as it thinks, but its my hood and full of life, and when the sun interrupts the long grey Pacific Northwest off-season, you can feel the life in the sidewalks and the buildings that are too old and shitty to gentrify, and even the hipster beards have better curl and loft. Also I got a new camera and that makes pictures seem to just take themselves. Lets ignore the camera for now, its just a prop to help me show off my home turf a bit.
Vancouveriana
Two pairs of pictures that could only have been taken right here in my hometown. City Hall Its design is, admittedly, vaguely Stalinist; an effect relieved by the disorderly tree-filled jumble around it, and especially by the pink neon clock. Ive seen a million pictures of it but never from this angle before. Since the building is sort of monochrome I decided to try a B&W treatment of another shot, and it worked OK. Disclosure: The building has a flagpole and a radio antenna,but I amputated them. The harbour Its the reason Vancouver exists, so we should respect it. What happened was, I was out with an Ingress flash-farm posse, and I have to say it was really damn pleasant strolling around Waterfront Park with the sun setting, chatting with the people.
Springies
The name is a back-formation from selfie , obviously. Herewith four botanicals only conceivable in the season after winter. First, a magnolia blossom emerging from its carapace; I didnt open the shutters wide enough to blur out the background but its still kinda cute. Next, a white camellia with red spots; not a terribly common flavor unless my Internet search results mislead me. Does anyone out there know what this kind is called? Finally, Sakura; all sorts of focus problems but still, it made me happy to see them, and I hope it helps your mood too. We have just maybe survived this winter.
Ethical Privacy Choices
Heres a little rant I posted to an IETF mailing list thread on whether the IETF should move its public-facing services to private-by-default mode. Someone posted a reply suggesting that the user gets to choose the degree of security that they consider appropriate . Here, I think, is a key issue. I disagree. What?! How can I possibly disagree with user choice? Because, a huge majority of people: Arent aware that there is a choice to be made, and shouldnt need to be, Do not understand the technical issues surrounding the choice, and shouldnt have to, Do not understand the legal/policy issues surrounding the choice, and shouldnt have to.
N5-Cam VII: Long Train Ride
On March 1st I went from Barcelona to London by train. It was amusing and relaxing; If you can spare a day and some money, I recommend it. You get on a Spanish Renfe train at 9AM-ish from Barcelona Sants, arrive at Paris Gare de Lyon at 4-ish, get on the Eurostar from Gare du Nord at 5:20-ish, and arrive at London St. Pancras at 6:15. Buying the ticket from Renfe and Eurostar using a computer in Canada turned out to be hard; Web search totally tailed to turn up a useful vendor, but I complained on Twitter and got a pointer to Loco2, who apparently exist to do exactly that.
Choose the Right Fish
We had informal Saturday brunch with families of kids in our second-graders class in Old Chinatown at The Emerald, once a dim-sum joint, now a hipster supper club. The old-Chinatowners are aging out and some of the people moving in look Chinese because hey, this is Vancouver, but theyre younger and single-er and probably dont speak much ã?q. Whatever its becoming will probably be interesting, but not the same. Old Chinatown is still full of life and bustle and color, but to me theres something of a museum-piece feeling. I wonder how long therell still be this kind of shop? Lots of fish!
LifeSaver Works on KitKat
The 4.4 release of Android broke my LifeSaver 2 app, which migrates phone-call and SMS logs from your old phone to a new one. It was my fault not Androids, because the API for the SMS database was undocumented and thus unofficial. With KitKat, now its official. And slightly different. So I just uploaded v2.3, which seems to fix the problem. Thanks Chris! I actually didnt do the work for KitKat; a nice Googler named Chris Jones got it 80% of the way there and the last lap was pretty easy. Something had changed in the SDK in a way that screwed up my layouts, so I had to refiddle those a bit, and then Chris changes exposed a couple of other useful little refactorings.
Retina Screen Tab Sweep
When youre running your 15" Retina Mac in high-rez mode and you still dont have room for all your tabs, you probably have a lifestyle problem. One solution is to publish the links, so if your dont-kill-this-tab instinct turned out to be right, you have Internet Memory on your side. Roger Angell Hes been writing beautiful stories for The New Yorker for an insanely long time; This Old Man is what its like to be 93. Speaking as a male specimen of Homo sapiens rapidly approaching 60, one of my ambitions now is to be interesting as an old man, which Angell manifestly is.
Stross (unfinished) Merchant Princes
I just finished reading the three volumes of The Merchant Princes Omnibus by Charlie Stross: The Bloodline Feud, The Traders War, and The Revolution Trade. Theyre huge. Theyre fun. There are more plotlines left dangling than at the Season-3½ point in Lost. Theyre good enough to have robbed me of considerable sleep. I started reading the series a decade or so ago as originally published, got bored, and left it behind. The story of how six blah books became three much better ones is long, and Id think really interesting to anyone who cares about how novels are written and sold; SciFi/Fantasy stories in particular.
Keybase.io
Ive been fooling around with this for the last couple of days; you can find me at keybase.io/timbray. I think it might be pointing a useful way forward on private-by-default communication and, for what it does, it gets a lot of things right. The problem Wed like to be confident that the messages we send across the net email, chat, SMS, whatever are secure. When we say secure we mean some combination of nobody can read them but the person whos supposed to and the person reading them can be sure who sent them. In principle, this should be easy because of Public-key cryptography, which has been around for a while, is reliable enough to power basically 100% of the financial transactions that cross the net, and for which theres excellent open-source software that anyone can use for free.
¨Ëal The Wind Rises
Miyazakis latest is big and messy and disturbing and sad and very beautiful. We took two seven-year-old girls to see it because, well, Miyazaki; a mistake, this is for grown-ups. Its biographical and the protagonist is a real person: Jiro Horikoshi, most famous as the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane, which dominated the first half of the Pacific-aerial part of WWII. The movie also has an earthquake, a Great Fire, an Italian count/airplane-designer, a tribute to Thomas Mann, a romance, and a fatal disease. Its also sl-o-o-ow. (Which is one of the things Ive always loved about Miyazaki, his willingness to take a scene, even one thats peripheral to his story, and let it run and run and run.
La Barceloneta
Thats the official name I guess, but taxi drivers just say Barceloneta; its a little triangle of Barcelona enclosing Port Vell, the Old Harbor. Its not fancy but its nice, and its not like any neighborhood Ive stayed in before. I had a decent Airbnb on Carrer de Grau i Torras gotta love those Catalan names. I assume Carrer means something like alley ; here it is. I offer the night-time version first because thats when I arrived. When theres light, you can see the ocean at the end of the street.If you were here I could point out the place I stayed.
Hyphenation Lessons
I just made a bunch of changes to the site here, which should make it run faster without visible effect. The details might be of interest to Web-tech and publishing-tech geeks. Plus, words on being sentimental about Perl code. The H&J history Back in 2011 I right-justified the text here, and for that to work you need hyphenation, which I did with Hyphenator.js on the grounds that it makes perfect sense to run this sort of publishing busywork on the Webs billions of underworked client systems, rather than on its millions of often-overworked servers. [Pop quiz: Whats wrong with that thinking?]
Retina in Practice
My new 15" MacBook has a Retina screen, which I labeled a good solution to a #firstworldproblem . Now that Ive had the Retina-vs-not difference shoved in my face, I realize its more dramatic than you might think. On my desk at work is a Dell 30" monitor that Google bought for me back in 2010. Its right in front of me and most work happens there; the Mac is on a stand off to the side and I dont use it much except for telecons, hangouts, Skype, and so on. But of course when Im away from the office, Im working on the Macs screen.
The Web is 25
Were celebrating! I can remember, sometime in the early Nineties, being irritated when emails and Usenet postings started filling up with these new things called URLs , initially-awkward-looking agglomerations of slashes and colons and letters. I tried to ignore the Web till I couldnt and then it changed my life and then it changed the world. The change continues. We owe it a lot; what you get out of the Web depends on what you put into it. Disclosure Im hopelessly biased; I built one of the first Web search engines and benefited from one of the first Web IPOs and and consulted for Netscape and was appointed to the W3C TAG and became Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems.
N5-cam VI: Spanish Vistas
Since phonecams have focal lengths that are fixed and low, they ought to be credible pocket-cam replacements for wide-angle shots. But you have to worry whether they can handle massed details. Lets see. Last Friday I took a day off and visited Monstserrat, near Barcelona, where theres a Benedictine Abbey with a famous black Virgin. First, here are two photos looking down. The first shot is from a half hours (very steep) hike up from the Abbey; the second from the train coming back down. Im using the first shot as the wallpaper for my 15" Macs Retina display and it looks glorious.
New Mac Setup
In preparation for leaving Google, I wanted a new computer in time to make sure I could get all the non-Google stuff (pictures, blogging software, music) moved off my Googlemac. I got a maxed-out MacBook Pro 15" (16G RAM, 1T SSD) thus dumping an estimated $1,000 profit into Apples cash hoard. What did I get for it and how did I set it up? Ive been using OS X for eleven years now, have learned a few things, and theres a chance that some of the tricks here could be useful to others. State of the 2014 Art I got a Pro rather than an Air because I want the big screen, big memory, and fast CPU, mostly for photo-editing with Lightroom.
Punishing Peter Jackson
On a recent 10½-hour flight I watched The Desolation of Smaug. Now we have to work out how to punish Peter Jackson for this travesty. The movie extends from just after our heroes arrival at the Carrock to where Smaug decides to leave the Mountain and make trouble. Only Jackson took out a whole bunch of plot points that might have made excellent cinema, replacing them with bafflegab written by someone much less competent than J.R.R. Tolkien. OK, there are one or two good things: The palace of the Woodland Elves king, the heaped treasure under the Lonely Mountain, Smaug himself, and Stephen Fry as the Master of Lake Town.
JSON Redux AKA RFC7159
The IETF has just revised its JSON spec; the new version is RFC7159 that link is to the IETFs traditional line-printer format, Ive parked an HTML version at rfc7159.net for people who want to actually read the thing not just link to it. [Disclosure: I edited RFC7159.] Highlights RFC7159 cleans up some ambiguities and inconsistencies in various JSON definitions, none of which caused any real-world pain. More important, it captures industry experience about stupid things you can do in your JSON that are allowed by the spec but will cause problems in practice. If youre interested, I recommend opening up the HTML version and searching forward for the string interop .
MWC
That stands for Mobile World Congress; it happens in early spring in Barcelona, and its mammoth; something like 75,000 people show up to wheel and deal.Theyre wheeling and dealing for big bucks; the mobile industry is huge and for four days almost everyone is here. Ive got no inside information on the nature of the deals the telcos make, with handset makers and antenna engineers and backhaul builders. But heres where they make em; almost every booth has executive meeting rooms , and one of the eight huge halls is nothing but hospitality suites and meetings. What MWC is like Big.
OpenID Connect is Here
Signed, sealed, and delivered as of February 26th. Better than that: In full-volume production at Google and Deutsche Telekom for a while now. Based on OAuth 2, which has been frozen since 2012. Not perfect, but Id call it one of the safer technology deployment bets you can make right now. Lets say OIDC for short, OpenID Connect is kind of klunky. The Basics OIDC specifies a handful of OAuth 2.0 flows; the most important result is an ID Token, which I wrote about last year; one of my favorite pieces of standards-ware in years. An ID Token is an assertion, signed by an IDP, that some particular person was authenticated for the purposes of some particular app.
N5-cam V: Barcelona Subway
I offer further research on the hypothesis that a decent modern phonecam (in this case a Nexus 5) means you dont need a good pocket cam any more. In particular, how about street photography? Where by street I mean under the street not on it and color not B&W. Street is said to require discretion, responsiveness, and subtle tonal variations. Heres the evidence. Worth enlarging, if only for the hands. A few things need saying: First, they werent together; the younger was traveling with a young man sporting a guitar and flowing curls. And although shes smiling once, she wasnt a happy woman, clearly troubled; mind you, it was early and cold.
The Bay Area
Last week I announced that I was leaving Google and said in passing that I found the Bay Area congested, racist, incestuous, and overpriced . Those four adjectives were apparently more newsworthy than my career moves; fair enough. The reaction (and there was a lot of it) ranged from giggly agreement to sincere anger. So I should follow up. I think congested and overpriced hardly seem worth elaborating on. Yes, my own hometown is overpriced too so I grant a certain unfairness in my bandying that word. Id bypass incestuous too, but I cant noting that in a private discussion someone suggested I meant the startup/VC/tech-press Human Centipede .
Leaving Google
As of March 17th Ill be an ex-employee. Its an amicable separation in the face of irreconcilable differences: I wouldnt move to California and Google wouldnt open a Vancouver office. I havent decided what to do next. Lets go with Q&A format. Seriously, about remote work? Yep. Both before and after being hired, I had been asked to consider moving south. I didnt want to and politely declined. Eventually, the group Im in politely informed me that staying remote wasnt an option. I talked to a couple of other groups but my heart wasnt really in it, because I decided Googles position was correct.
Ingress in 2014
It was stormy at dusk last Sunday; Shoekey and I hunched shoulder-to-shoulder in a waterfront park, 90 km/h of swirling wind driving a mix of fresh rain and salt spray at us from every direction, zip-loc-bagged Androids in hand. Because in a big Ingress op, you gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, Im playing again. Back Story (You can get the full-length version in Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, Advanced Ingress, Ingress Chase Scene, Ingress Ebb and Flow, and The Ingress Social Network): I got interested in late 2012, played off and on through last May, then faded away, bored.
Hockey Publishing
I just enjoyed watching the first-round Finland-Canada hockey game from Sochi; the Finnish defense is awesome, and Tuukka Rask just about beat Canada single-handed. Also, they gotta do something about the ice quality. But this isnt about that, its about Wikipedia, once again beating the world. After the game was over, CBC TV showed a helpful grid of the rest of the tournament and how the playoffs worked. It went by a little too fast so I went to pull it up on the Internet. The Sochi14 site is horribly organized, but eventually, after much thrashing around, I tracked down the hockey playoff page, but nobody had bothered to fill it in.
Why Flappy Bird is Brilliant
I heard the buzz and snagged it and played for the best part of an hour on a cross-Canada flight, never managed to get past level 10. The fact that the game is so addictive despite being so pathetically lame is trying to teach everyone a great big honking lesson. Pathetically lame? Well yeah, the graphics. And the birds. And the stupid extreme difficulty; with just a little bit of tuning (thinner pipes, bigger gaps) it could be a whole lot more playable. And the lesson is? Never be boring. When your bird goes phut! and youre done swearing, it takes one tap and maybe 3 seconds before the pathetic little 8-bit avian goober is back in flight.
Good Writing, Twice
I almost never use this space any more just for links but damn it this is my blog and I can if I want to. Here are two exceptional pieces of writing and you should go read them both: First, John Grubers Microsoft, Past and Future is by a huge margin the best thing Ive read on that transition, and Microsoft still matters, really a lot. Second, William Burroughs Doing Easy is unlike anything Ive read this year or last year either, will make you smile and is full of big important life lessons.
N5-cam IV: Lying Flowers
Its traditional at this time of year that I run close-ups of the first few crocuses, earliest harbingers of spring. Hah! Another chance to test out the proposition that mobile-device cams mean you dont need a serious camera any more. Well, what do you think? Two points to be made here: First, these crocuses are lying bastards because Spring isnt anywhere near, its been brutally cold, with highs around 0°C and nighttime lows way below that. The forecast is for snow. Second, Ive decided that my single biggest gripe with the N5-cam is its extreme wide-angle-ness; somehow or other, it needs a zoom.
Parading
The nations that matter are those that export culture; China is one of those. Particularly this time of year and around the Pacific Rim; because its Chinese New Year. On Sunday, I marched in the big Vancouver parade. There arent that many pictures of me on this blog, but heres one. Photo credit: Tom Magliery wielding his Nikkor 70-300mm Christmas present. I was there because my 7-year-old is in a Mandarin-bilingual program with a couple of wonderful super-high-energy teachers who organize this sort of thing, and I recklessly checked the will volunteer box. They told us paraders that we ought to smile for the (many) cameras and in fact that was easy; at every moment of the hour-and-a-half or so, the crowds by the street were smiling and waving and taking pics and generally having a blast, so how could you not smile back at them?
Hot Mirrorless Fun
The golden age of photography continues; now the mirrorlesses have banged through the saloon doors, looking for a throwdown with the SLRs. Its fun! Today I have loads of links, some to unmissable picture galleries (not mine) and a portrait of Fujifilm buyer paralysis. Basics If you already know all about the mirrorless thing, skip on ahead to the next section (but stop to check out the pic). Traditionally, good cameras were SLRs which means that you look at the picture youre gonna take through the lens youre gonna take it with, courtesy of an elaborate steampunk prism-and-mirror arrangement that sends the light rays to the viewfinder.
N5-cam IV: Brighter Bridges
In the previous outings in this series, Ive been torturing the poor little camera in my Nexus 5 with extreme low light, and I suppose it deserves better. If you want light, point the camera at a light in this case, the shade of the Ikea-style floor lamp in my office. Wow, lots of detail. This makes a heck of an Android wallpaper. I was at a dojo watching the judokas work out and wondered how the little guy would do with fast-moving bodies in basic interior light. I didnt actually catch any hot action, but I loved the ceiling. Anyhow, lets do some real sunshine.
Moving the Gender Needle
Ive been moaning for years, in public forums and on this blog, about the horrible gender imbalance in the software tribe: the women are missing. Im depressed because, numerically, things havent gotten any better. But there are grounds for optimism, just maybe. Its the numbers, stupid Theyre horrible. If Wikipedias right, less than 20% of university grads entering the profession are female, and the number is falling. So, basically, any employer that can get their female headcount noticeably over 20% is apt to feel smug. Is that pathetic or what? I dont want to be all soulless here, but the numbers really matter.
Winterlong Tab Sweep
Really long, I mean. But the organization is beyond criticism because there isnt any. Category: Other Item: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot's prison letters to Slavoj }i~ek (and she plays hard-ass music too). Item: David Weinbergers Pronouns were a mistake that we can fix. David Malki: Mortality record from 1665. Category: Wrong The egregious Evgeny Morozov got a slimepiece about the Maker movement published in The New Yorker. Remarkably, he apparently did not actually visit a Maker Faire or talk to an actual practitioner. What was The New Yorker thinking? Im not linking to it. Category: Fun Ars gives us The 20 best (and three most disappointing) video games of 2013; I only played one of them, because Ingress, and it is the most utter bullshit that thats not on Ars list.
N5-cam III: Toronto by Night
I visited my brother in Toronto and we went out to drink & talk & eat on a cold evening; I didnt take an actual camera-as-such, but that didnt keep good pictures from arriving in front of me, so I snapped away with the Nexus 5. Thus, another test of the hypothesis that a mobilecam can replace a serious pocketcam. A challenging one too, since it was dark out and I keep the flash turned off. And the pictures are better than not having any; pleasant enough and a reminder of good time. On the one hand really not close to what the Sony or the Fuji could have captured; but on the other, I didnt have those with me.
N5-cam II: Scrubbing Up
In my last N5-cam outing, Low Light, I suggested contradictory things. First, that I was going to investigate using this as a serious pocket camera, and second, that since this is Just A Phone, theres no need for postprocessing. Then I ran across Craig Mods pieces Photography, hello and Goodbye, Cameras which assume, as part of the argument that cameras need to be, essentially, networked lenses , that youre going to process your mobile shots with serious tools like Lightroom as a matter of course. So I did. Metaphorical scrubbings My wife recently attended her nieces wedding; also in attendance was a nephew, something of a hobbledehoy in his late teens; but he looked remarkably presentable in wedding finery; Scrubs up well, doesnt he? she said as we reviewed the photos.
Standing In Line
What happened was, I ran down the street to the grocery store for a couple of items, a spur-of-the-moment thing. Picked them up, and then there was a big line-up for the cashiers. I stared blankly for a moment and fished in my pocket... oops! Id left my phone at home. Wow... I was going to have to interact with reality, in the form of a supermarket queue. There are all these Net contrarians lamenting everyones constant escape into their mobile devices screen, and now my escape was cut off. So... screw the contrarians, it sucked. Everywhere I looked, I was looking at overaggressive marketing or celebrity tabloids.
N5-cam I: Low Light
I hear that pocket cams are over because phonecams have eaten that space; so lets see if my Nexus 5 can convince me one way or another. Back story Google gave me a Nexus 5 for the holidays; three days later I dropped it from a fair height onto a sidewalk; sob. Hey, an opportunity to try something different! I considered the iPhone 5c, the Moto X and G, and especially that groovy little waterproof Sony Z1. But up here in Canada its really hard to get any of the above in unlocked form except for the Apple, which felt overpriced.
Wiggly Reflection Improvement
Not too long ago I stayed in a random hotel in a random downtown and took a picture out the window because the windows across the street were apparently curved and there was a sort of funhouse-mirror effect. This is moderately processed, mostly to remove color from the nonreflective bits. I thought it might look good in B&W so I fiddled and fiddled, then remembered Id taken advantage of working at Google to get a free copy of Silver Efex Pro; so I fired that up and heres what I got. You might want to enlarge it. The workflow is pretty simple.
5k: Jeff Beck Rock n Roll Party
I saw the LP on the new-vinyl rack in a record store and was surprised, because Ive been a pretty big Jeff Beck fan for quite a few years now, but Id never heard of it. It turns out the Rock n Roll Party is a collection of traditional pop chestnuts with a super hot band, not like a Jeff Beck record at all, and excellent. This is happy, happy music. But maybe the YouTube version is all you need. ( 5k series introduction here; with an explanation of why the title may look broken.) The context Theres this jazz bar in New York called Iridium where Les Paul played most Monday nights for the last 13 years of his life, which ended in 2009.
Software in 2014
Were at an inflection point in the practice of constructing software. Our tools are good, our server developers are happy, but when it comes to building client-side software, we really dont know where were going or how to get there. Happy times upstream The art and science of building server-side code is just fine, thank you; the technologys breadth and polish has been ramping for years and still is. More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and its really easy to make things talk HTTP. More or less everything is built with an MVC-or-equivalent level of abstraction, and there are good frameworks to help us work sanely and cleanly.
Good Books about Bad Places
Christmas was populated as usual with family and food and happiness but this year I was stealing time from them (often sleep time) to read The Orphan Masters Son. The books an explosion of pain and craziness and love and strange, strange flavors, views from angles few could imagine at a place nobody reading it will likely thank goodness ever see. It dwells amid the horror of the Kim dynastys dystopic North Korea; which in my case is a little weird, because the only other book thats hit me this hard in recent years is Dogs at the Perimeter (more here), rooted in the Khmer Rouge Year Zero ravaging of Cambodias luckless people.
More Things About TV
Wow, when I asked Is 4K BS? three days before Christmas, I didnt expect much of a reaction, but is that little piece ever popular. A bunch of useful follow-ons appeared in the comments and on G+ and Twitter, so here they are. Never mind 4K, lots of 1080p screens are already being wasted because overaggressive or poorly-implemented upstream compression by the broadcasters. I really notice this on live sports. Some Sunday, when there are 3 or 4 different NFL games on, switch between them and if your sources are like mine, some will have way better pictures than others.
Is 4K BS?
I hear that Sony & friends are going to start telling us that our HDTVs arent good enough and we all need to upgrade to 4K (which is twice the dimensions and 4 times the pixels of 1080p). NBC news says the experts are unconvinced, and quotes one of them, retina scientist, photographer, and blogger Bryan Jones. I thought Id do the numbers and yeah, I think its probably BS. In Jones widely-quoted piece Apple Retina Display, he argues that the literature shows the human eye has an angular resolution of about an arcminute (1/60 degree). So, sitting in front of an NFL game, it occurred to me to wonder how far apart, in arcminutes, the pixels in my TV are.
What Are Handsets For?
I got a Nexus 5 from Google for Christmas; it replaces an old Nexus S used as a dumbphone. But in some ways I was happier with the S, even though the 5 is way more capable. Im thinking (once again) that Size Matters. Once again, you say? I have a special claim to the Size-Matters tech-blog territory. Back in 2009, I fell in love with the first 7" device, the original Galaxy Tab, and wrote a mega-review, then really drilled into the device-size trade-offs with Ten Theses on Tablets , then hammered on the issue some more in my Nexus 7 review.
Midwinter Veg Sauté
I invented this dish this evening and everyone liked it; a hearty and fairly-healthy comfort-food vegetable dish. Ingredients Two medium-sized leeks Two pretty-big carrots One fat parsnip Quite a bit of butter Hard Italian cheese to grate Almond meal (I went looking in the pantry for breadcrumbs and came up empty but ran across this; I think breadcrumbs would have worked just fine.) Garlic salt Method Peel the carrots and parsnip then chop them up pretty small, small enough to stir-fry. Melt some butter in a cast-iron frying pan, hot enough that the butter is bubbling but not smoking, toss in the carrots and parsnips and stir them around until theyre fairly buttery.
T-Mobile Fired Me
I like using the Internet while I visit the United States, which I do often. T-Mobile used to offer a service that worked well for people like me; I was a cheerful customer, but now theyve told me to go away. It used to work like this: Youd visit a US T-Mobile store once, get a pay-as-you-go account, and fill it up online before you visited. The pricing was irritatingly different for tablets and phones, but reasonable either way. But they changed their web site so I can no longer use my Canadian credit card: The form that you enter that on requires a US State and Zip code.
Content-free
Im thinking about successful new communication channels, and how we talk about whats in them. On Twitter, we say tweets. In the blogosphere and on Facebook, posts; also rants, reviews, and flames. Facebook has likes and now everything has links. But I note the entire absence of content ; the word, I mean. Yay! Ive loathed it ever since its first powerpoint-pitch appearance, meaning shit we dont actually care about but will attract eyeballs and make people click on ads . Except for they dont say people , they say users , a symptom of another attitude problem. With every year that passes, its increasingly clear that the appearance of content in any business plan is a symptom of (likely fatal) infection by cluelessness; and a good predictor of failure.
Feuerzangenbowle
I looked it up: A traditional German alcoholic drink for which a rum-soaked sugarloaf is set on fire and drips into mulled wine . It was a tasty treat, on offer at Vancouvers Christmas Market, which was a treat for the eyes, so I took pictures. There were little kids singing carols: Cute overload! There were Croatian dancers and an old-fashioned merry-go-round, and lots of booths selling bright things. Some of the decorations were worth zooming in on. Ive been to real Christmas Markets, in Würzburg and Antwerp, and theyre good fun.
Surveillance and the Media
As I write this Im angry at the CBC, Canadas national broadcaster, for their shoddy, shallow coverage of reformgovernmentsurveillance.com (lets say RGS for short). But the trap they fell into is probably attractive to many flavors of media. The 6PM news report opened with a few seconds of Zuckerberg saying he thought the government was blowing it in this space, then another few words from Zoe Lofgren talking about the NSA putting American business at a disadvantage. (Do ya think?!) Then there was a sudden 180° shift into hard polemics, with a snotty British professor opining that it was all the companies fault because they were sucking up the information, and the NSA wouldnt come after it if the companies werent collecting it, would they?
Browser Safety Details
Privacy on the Net isnt a binary on/off thing, its a continuum. Anything we can do to increase it is good; which includes handling corner cases. What happened was, during the last IETF, Paul Hoffman, an IETF veteran and friend, was staying in our spare room. We were sitting up talking about privacy, looking at a WordPress blog, and this weird thing happened: We typed in its address with https: at the front, and it showed up as locked/HTTPS in some browsers but not others. It took quite a bit of poking around to figure out. Whats actually happening First, wordpress.com is perfectly happy to accept secure HTTPS connections.
Space Operas!
Most geeks love em; some find the pleasure a little guilty. Gleaming silver ingots of engineering poetry reaching up out of gravitys mud carrying humanitys sparks into spaces blackness... and blowing each other up! Im here to recommend the work of James S.A. Corey , but the genre deserves a little survey. Kid stuff Yes, I grew up on E.E. Doc Smiths Lensmen books. Thats a horribly long time ago and I remember almost nothing, except for huge fleets of space battleships arranging themselves in surprising new attack formations: the Wedge, the Cone, the Cylinder. The price is down to free on Kindle for some of em; I suspect they havent aged well, but maybe Ill take one on a vacation someday.
Counter-Surveillance
Surveillance on the Internet is pervasive and well-funded; it constitutes a planetary-scale attack on people who need the Net. The IETF is grappling with the problem but the right path forward isnt clear. This story is being reported, but (near as I can tell) not by anyone whos on the actual mailing lists, reading whats being said. So, heres whats up. The story is long and unsimple, and therefore so is this ongoing fragment; sorry. On a perfect Internet Everyone would be confident that their traffic is private; only they and whoever theyre connecting to could ever see it. They wouldnt have to worry about what needs to be private and what doesnt because everything would be.
I Sold Some Bitcoins
I held the flimsy scrap of printout up to the Bitcoin ATMs scanner, tapped its screen, and ten crisp hundred-dollar bills shot into the delivery tray at the bottom. Maybe Bitcoin is real? What happened was, back in April when Bitcoin was last spiking, I bought a few, not using any of the exchanges (setup seems pretty heavyweight) but from another enthusiast, with cash. The price headed for the basement as soon as I loaded up, so I was feeling kind of stupid. But now its spiking again; nobody knows why, but I hear hints of big pools of money hovering, wanting into this asset class.
DevBeat
This was an odd but not-bad little developers event in San Fran put on by VC-biz pub VentureBeat. Im not 100% sure what DevBeat 2013 was trying to be, but anyhow the venue was cool and I got a neat picture of RMS. The contrast between the beautifully-groomed venture reporters and the scruffy geeks was pretty stark. And the program was patchy; putting on Alex Payne is always a good idea (I recommend his Monktoberfest preso), but having an advertised big-name star appearing Skype-only was a little off. And then there was RMS. Richard Stallman. Per his request, this work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Bike Fixers
Implicit in the Maker movement is a Fixer movement, and thats what Our Community Bikes is. Theyre right round the corner from us, and my 14-year goes there to patch up his commuter vehicle. Last Saturday, he went down to replace a hopelessly-busted inner tube, and when he hadnt come back after a couple hours I strolled over and helped out a little with some brake readjustments. The space is intense. Its also colorful, as long as you dont mind your colors with grease-stains. Hammer time! If you followed the link above, you will have noticed the unsubtle inclusiveness: Gender, ethnicity, able-bodied-ness, you name it.
IETF 88
I attended because I cared about work going on in the JSON and OAuth working groups, and because it was here in Vancouver. But this meeting was focused on pervasive surveillance of the Internet, and how to make it more expensive. This is worth everyones attention and deserves more explanation than Ive seen in the mainstream media. Having said that about the mainstream, Besieged, in The Economist, is not terrible. The Flavor of the IETF If you read The Tao of IETF youll know most of the things that matter, and if you care about the Internet you likely should.
Fresh From the Graveyard
What happened was, I visited Vancouvers Mountain View Cemetery, my 7-year-old daughter in tow. It was wet and grey. She was bored so I gave her a camera. Im not gonna claim shes a budding genius photographer; just that a kid with a pretty good camera and no preconceptions can surprise you. Of course, anyone knows you can make good pictures of flowers. Seven-year olds are apparently untroubled by fakeness in flowers. Also, they dont know that the cameras supposed to be held level. And they cant see any reason not to take extreme-wide-angle shots of an evergreen theyre standing in front of.
Emmylou, Richard, Rodney
This tour is currently in progress, billed as Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowella with Richard Thompson . If any of those names resonate, go see it. Vancouvers show was at The Orpheum, quite appropriate I think. Heres an architectural detail: Just like that bit in the picture, the Emmylou/Rodney set was beautifully-designed, perfectly-executed, and entirely traditional. Not a single lick or harmony or bridge was offered that hasnt been offered a thousand times before; they were mostly born in honkey-tonks and now live in fancy concert halls, and theres nothing wrong with either of those things. And there was nothing wrong with the concert.
CSS Drop Shadows
In early 2006, I added drop shadows to all the pictures here at ongoing; to do it I had to construct a 500-line Java program. At the time I remarked that CSS should just support drop shadows, and now it does. Heres how it looks: More or less exactly the same as my hand-constructed shadows, near as I can tell. So as of today, the whole sites a little lighter and faster and smarter. My thanks to the CSS designers and browser builders. Oh, hows it done?
HTTP Encryption Live-blog
The IETF HTTP Working Group is in a special place right now. It held a meeting this morning at IETF 88 on encryption and privacy; the room was packed and, just possibly, needles that matter were moved. Whats special, you ask? Well, most standards-writing committees labor in obscurity, ignored by the actual engineers who build the world. Or alternatively, ignored by the vendors that matter, while the rest try to use the standards process to claw their way into a closed market. Not HTTP; the guys from Chrome and Firefox and IE are in there with hammers and shovels, building the stuff in parallel with writing the specs for it, pointing out spec problems with refreshing reports like we tried it in release 16.2 and it broke 23% of clients. The goal What the people I respect want is for everything (yes, absolutely everything) transmitted across the Web to ...
Security in Internet Protocols
IETF 88 is going to be a pretty hot meeting, what with the world learning about lots of ugly attacks against everyones privacy and security. At the end of the day this is a policy problem not a technology problem; but to the extent that anything can be done at the technology level, a lot of the people who can do it are here. So I think these discussions matter, and Im going to do some rare semi-live-blogging to relay interesting news as it develops. Im starting with a report from something called the Apps Area Working Group . Mondays meeting took a very useful, methodical walk-through of the state of the security/encryption art in each of the major application Internet protocols.
Nifty Refresh-token Trick
What happened was, HR wanted to set up a partner to offer benefits for active Googlers only, and thus we discovered an OAuth 2-based trick that I bet will work in lots of other situations too. The scenario HR wanted to set up this financial-services company (lets call them FSCo ) with a special deal for Googlers. So FSCo needed a way to test whether someones an employee. But the financial services might survive their employment, so FSCo also needs an independent relationship with the people who use them. Heres how it works Suppose some Googler, lets say Ed Xample, wants to sign up.
Tab Sweep: Halloween
Well into Q3 and autumn, and my SAD is already stirring in the back corner of my brain. But any season is Harvest season on the Web. Lyrical cynicism From the Cassandra Does Tokyo blog: Winning The Battle But Losing The War? thoughts provoked by encountering the UKs Fort Halstead. Defies summarization, but worth reading. Fujifilmery I continue my fannish obsession with this stuff, due to my continuing love affair with the X-E1. Mark Schuelers Continuing the Love Affair A Practical Review of the Fujifilm X-E1 is one of the few considerations of the X-series from someone whos also spent considerable time with the Oly OM-D shooters.
FC9: Social Sign-in
This term gets bandied about quite a bit in the Federation Conversation. When it comes up, developers tend to strong emotional reactions: On the one hand We really need social sign-in to make our service work and on the other Ewww, no way; I dont want our users worried about whats being shared. Ive been digging around the subject; sometimes I think theres no there there. Facebook Connect is what started this conversation. The product name has vanished, doesnt even appear in the Facebook Platform Wikipedia article, even though you can still find the blog post announcing it and the launch notice.
Wok Lore
If youre on the Pacific Rim and you cook much, you need a wok. The right kind is the cheap kind; makes it pretty hard to go wrong stir-frying. Wed had various kinds of modern woks with anti-stick coverings and Id generally had trouble getting the hang of it; they were kind of klunky and the coating always started wearing off, so cleaning them became a pain in the butt. But I like stir-fry, so I went to Vancouver institution Ming Wo for advice, and the nice lady said Well, carbon steel of course, round bottom and youll need this ring here to hold it on your burner. Price tag under $50, and I bet the total manufacturing cost was at least $5.
Why the Obamacare Website Sucks
Not a great launch. Wonder how many people with serious Web street cred are surprised? Ill tell you: zero. But its amazing how many political commentators are suddenly overflowing with site-building chops. In California, driving down the highway, I put the radio to scan and it pulled in some lively talk show, the man and woman were exchanging amazement over problems at Healthcare.gov. She said Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook basically overnight! Whats wrong with these cretins! And I just about drove off the road; have been holding my breath waiting for someone who knows this biz to explain why it could never have worked, out of the gate.
DevBeat
I normally dont post here any more about events Im speaking at, but DevBeat looks unusual. I mean, follow that link and look at the list of entertainers, which includes RMS, Al3x, DHH, Rasmus, and Mojombo. Who have in common, near as I can tell, exactly nothing. Its a VentureBeat thing so I guess itll be crawling with VCs and people looking for money; Ill try to moderate my general negativity about the current state of VC. But I have to say, its one of the few events where I look at the roster and think That should be interesting.
Things About the X-E1
Seven months ago I got an X-E1, a product of Fujifilm, who announced the X-E2 today; an occasion for going a little deeper on my time with the camera. With a dozen pictures. 18-55mm@34, F5, 1/250 sec, ISO 200 First, the conclusion Its the best camera Ive ever used: Light, wonderful in the hand, perfect controls, astounding lenses, pleasing pictures. So if you were thinking of buying a Serious Camera, this is totally one of the ones you should look at. Or maybe the X-E2; more on that below. Did you say perfect controls ? Yep. The picture shows what you see when you look down at the camera in your hands.
Canvas is Easy and Fun
Ive been fooling with a favorite-color app as an Identity-tech testbed, and I wanted to reward people just a little for taking the effort to pick and save and maybe share their own faves. Id seen some of the flashy stuff that the cool kids are doing with HTML5 and even though Im really a server-side guy it looked like fun, so I poked around. What I discovered is that the HTML5 Canvas is easy to learn and easy to program, so Im going to show you a little hack I did, not because theres anything particularly wonderful about it, but just to try help convince anyone who hasnt dived in that maybe they should.
Ads In Front of Things
Theyre bad. I wait feverishly for your ad to finish loading so I can click on the X to dismiss it. The only exception is when I decide my lifes completeness does not depend on the pathetic page behind the awful ad, so I just kill the window. I promise I will never read your stupid ad thats in front of the things that I thought I wanted to see. When I see it, I suspect a broken business model; if you need to inflict this kind of abuse on your readers, a barrels bottom is being scraped. If thats whats up well Im sorry, sucks to be you and I genuinely hope quality publishing finds good business models but Im really fucking sure none of them are floating interstitials.
At the Market
Granville Island market I mean, a nice place in Vancouver, particularly on a sunny Sunday in October, Canadian-Thanksgiving weekend. In among the merchants there are buskers, mostly good; this sharp-dressing dude has been singing sentimental tunes in French for years there, not always with a backdrop this good. Inside the Childrens Market, theres a store with kites and stuffies. Here are some more photos of the market in general and the kite store in particular from 2008, taken with my short-lived and difficult Ricoh GX-100 which nonetheless took some good pictures for me. The quality of the produce at the Island is, to be frank, not up there with what you can get at a decent organic-focused supermarket, but the variety and quantity are excellent and you cant beat the visuals.
The Ingress Social Network
While I go days at a time without turning on the client, I do still go out on an Ingress level-8 op every week or two; and now I have a couple of purely-social reasons to pitch in now and then. Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, Advanced Ingress, Ingress Chase Scene, and Ingress Ebb and Flow. The first is that my wife started playing. After watching me grind away between November and April, she suddenly asked for an account and quietly worked her way to Level 8 in less than four months; it helps that the portal density near our house is extreme, and also she travels to other big cities.
History Mystery
I just finished After Tamerlane by John Darwin, of whom I know nothing. Its a 600-dense-page monster and my impulse-bought-but-unread queue bulges behind it. Its immensely ambitious and I can recommend it for some if not all. Tl;dr: A history of the last 600 years with a strong economics flavor, which asks: Why did Europe come to dominate the globe? Why Europe? The death of Timur (AKA Tamerlane) in the early 15th century makes an interesting jumping-off point because, as Darwin points out in the books central insight, at that point the world had three centers of commerce and civilization: Europe, the South Central Asia, and China, and (here it is) their power and wealth were, at that point, about equivalent.
Tab Sweep
The tabs! They multiply like magnificently miscellaneous maggots! Literature Good Time Crime: Talking With Elmore Leonard in Contrappasso Magazine. For those like Scalzi in general or the Old Mans War series in particular, check out The Sagan Diary over at Subterranean Press. And now for something completely different: Jeremy Wilson, perhaps the leading biographer of T.E. Lawrence ( of Arabia ), observes that there have been many moving-picture takes on his life, and offers T. E. Lawrence alternative drama treatments, which I enjoyed tremendously but then Im a Lawrence nut. Identity Thats right, stuff related to my day job. Nat Sakimura: What to read when you want to build OpenID Connect and Write an OpenID Connect server in three simple steps.
Bugg Synthesis
I was sitting up late; family asleep and work over, scanning around. The New Yorker feed threw up Jake Bugg: From Nottingham to Malibu. He sounded interesting on paper and, hey, the article was full of YouTube links and what with the ChromeCast, I was listening and watching right there and then. Yeah, Jakes good, Id go see him if he came to town. You may never have heard of him but I guarantee youve heard Lightning Bolt. Synthesis? The Internet is one great big fat culture pump, dont you forget it.
2013 Nexus 7 with LTE
I bought the top-of-the-line model from the Play store for $349; I was still liking last years model but this is sleeker and prettier and goes faster. The differences are less dramatic than Id expected, but theyre good things. In the hand and pocket Its lighter and thinner and smoother. The first two are good; I think I slightly prefer the textured back of last years 7, but this balances much better in the hand. Its also very slightly taller; just enough to cause problems with one of the pockets Id been parking its predecessor in. But I doubt this will bother most people.
Myst is 20
Not obvious even looking back, and one of my influences. Check out the excellent Lost to the Ages write-up on Grantland. With thanks, a rock&roll metaphor, and a terribly sad story. Sad story So I played Myst and was an early Riven adopter; played it right through and solved all those pathologically-enraging puzzles with (almost) no recourse to hint sites, and just as I finally broke through and freed Catherine, the fucking CD delaminated right there in the drive and the game melted down on-screen before my horrified eyes. So I never even saw whatever triumphal-victory sequence Riven offers. Im still mad; but its a pretty minor grievance against life.
FC8: On Trust
All these technology and information-flow and money issues in the Federation Conversation are real, they matter. But none of them matter as much as trust. For flavor, heres commenter Dewald Reynecke: I don't trust Facebook/Google as far as I can throw them I simply do not want to outsource my identity to an advertising company. Everybody has to trust somebody sometimes. But the Internet and the world are scary places; mistrust is a healthy component of sanity. And its complicated, because it isnt just people trusting (or not) Identity Providers (IDPs) and the apps using them. The apps and IDPs have trust decisions to make, too.
FC7: Users vs Apps
When a person signs into an app, thats a transaction, and value is exchanged. Who comes out ahead on the deal? This is part of the Federation Conversation; Ill excerpt from Gary Royal in a comment on my Google+ post: Federated login has a clear benefit to the service provider (access to disaggregated user data, particularly that users social contacts), but only an ostensible benefit to end users (freedom from having to remember yet another password), so on that level its purely a swindle designed to obtain detailed information about a user in return for nothing. If thats true, Federated sign-in in is a raw deal and nobody should ever want to do it.
The Fingerprint Hack
Today, Germanys Chaos Computer Club claims to have hacked the iPhone 5s Touch ID. Since I now get paid to think about Identity stuff all the time, Ill think out loud about the question: Is Touch ID a good idea? Lets assume that: The CCC isnt lying. The crack isnt trivial; youre going to need some materials, time, and expertise. Lets split our question: First, is Touch ID worthwhile? Second, is it better or worse than a four-digit PIN? [BTW, just because banks use four digits doesnt mean you have to; I use five and know people who use six.]
The Fingerprint Hack
Today, Germanys Chaos Computer Club claims to have hacked the iPhone 5s Touch ID. Since I now get paid to think about Identity stuff all the time, Ill think out loud about the question: Is Touch ID a good idea? Lets assume that: The CCC isnt lying. The crack isnt trivial; youre going to need some materials, time, and expertise. Lets split our question: First, is Touch ID worthwhile? Second, is it better or worse than a four-digit PIN? [BTW, just because banks use four digits doesnt mean you have to; I use five and know people who use six.]
Editing JSON
As sort of a 2% project, Im helping out over in the IETF, working on a revision of the JSON spec. I wrote back in February about the depressing floppiness of the JSON spec, which allows things that are just bugs to people like me who use JSON always and only to represent hashes and records and suchlike in network APIs. And if the API is a crypto/authentication thing, those bugs can be nasty exploits. (Think duplicate key or naked surrogate , and shudder.) What I hadnt realized was that there actually isnt a standalone anything you can link to and say This is the JSON spec ; RFC 4627 is just a mime-type registration.
Editing JSON
As sort of a 2% project, Im helping out over in the IETF, working on a revision of the JSON spec. I wrote back in February about the depressing floppiness of the JSON spec, which allows things that are just bugs to people like me who use JSON always and only to represent hashes and records and suchlike in network APIs. And if the API is a crypto/authentication thing, those bugs can be nasty exploits. (Think duplicate key or naked surrogate , and shudder.) What I hadnt realized was that there actually isnt a standalone anything you can link to and say This is the JSON spec ; RFC 4627 is just a mime-type registration.
Main Street Photo Fun
In which I take some ordinary street shots and overprocess them for fun. Vancouver likes street culture, especially around The Main (which is central and cant be ignored but not actually anyones Main street). I took the kids down to the the Main Street Shift Autumn Festival on Sunday and came back with pix. Theyre nothing special; Im mostly just showing off what you can do with a Fujifilm X-E1 in a pinch, with extra glamor from the nifty Nik Silver Efex software that I get for free because Im at Google. Food It aint a street party without street food; my 7-year-old had a cinnamon-apple-tart, an organic popsicle, and a mango lassi.
Main Street Photo Fun
In which I take some ordinary street shots and overprocess them for fun. Vancouver likes street culture, especially around The Main (which is central and cant be ignored but not actually anyones Main street). I took the kids down to the the Main Street Shift Autumn Festival on Sunday and came back with pix. Theyre nothing special; Im mostly just showing off what you can do with a Fujifilm X-E1 in a pinch, with extra glamor from the nifty Nik Silver Efex software that I get for free because Im at Google. Food It aint a street party without street food; my 7-year-old had a cinnamon-apple-tart, an organic popsicle, and a mango lassi.
FC6: Who Are You?
This is part of the Federation Conversation, where commenter Jashan worried, reasonably enough: Users tend to forget which of the gazillion available services they have registered at your site with. And then they're too lazy to try all the possibilities. And then they're gone. Ouch! On the other hand, they might show up at your IDP-free site and forget what username theyd logged in with. Or they remember that but forget the password. And then they worry theyre trying the wrong username. Which is to say, as with many other Identity issues, there are a lot of ways to end up completely hooped.
FC6: Who Are You?
This is part of the Federation Conversation, where commenter Jashan worried, reasonably enough: Users tend to forget which of the gazillion available services they have registered at your site with. And then they're too lazy to try all the possibilities. And then they're gone. Ouch! On the other hand, they might show up at your IDP-free site and forget what username theyd logged in with. Or they remember that but forget the password. And then they worry theyre trying the wrong username. Which is to say, as with many other Identity issues, its hard. But we can agree: The less cognitive load it takes to get into your site, the more people will.
iPhone 5c and 5s
Dont they look great? I might get one (no, really). Theyre interesting... Lets play Apple Pundit! You might get one?! Well, its like this: Since June, I actually havent had a smartphone; just an ancient account-free Nexus S that I use for voice, SMS, and occasional hot spots. Im not starved for mobile Internet because my 16G Nexus 7 with celullar data has been a champ, makes me very happy every day, is a terrific world traveler, excels at email and Web and The Economist and Ingress and Twitter and G+ and Kindle and MLB.tv. Ill probably replace it with one of the new ones because, well, have you held one?
iPhone 5c and 5s
Dont they look great? I might get one (no, really). Theyre interesting... Lets play Apple Pundit! You might get one?! Well, its like this: Since June, I actually havent had a smartphone; just an ancient account-free Nexus S that I use for voice, SMS, and occasional hot spots. Im not starved for mobile Internet because my 16G Nexus 7 with celullar data has been a champ, makes me very happy every day, is a terrific world traveler, excels at email and Web and The Economist and Ingress and Twitter and G+ and Kindle and MLB.tv. Ill probably replace it with one of the new ones because, well, have you held one?
FC5: Manage Those Passwords!
Inventing good passwords is hard and so is remembering them, thats part of the problem. So, how about we get computers to do the tedious stuff for us? Turns out you can, using something called a Password manager . Are these things going to end the Federation Conversation? [This piece is part of that conversation.] Introduction If you already use a password manager and know the basics, you can hop down to the Thought experiment section. First: To those of you who have a lot of passwords and arent using a password manager, Id say: Start now. Second: If youre wondering which to use, David Stroms Best tools for protecting passwords is pretty good, even though its enterprise-focused and spends time on management options that I dont care about.
FC5: Manage Those Passwords!
Inventing good passwords is hard and so is remembering them, thats part of the problem. So, how about we get computers to do the tedious stuff for us? Turns out you can, using something called a Password manager . Are these things going to end the Federation Conversation? [This piece is part of that conversation.] Introduction If you already use a password manager and know the basics, you can hop down to the Thought experiment section. First: To those of you who have a lot of passwords and arent using a password manager, Id say: Start now. Second: If youre wondering which to use, David Stroms Best tools for protecting passwords is pretty good, even though its enterprise-focused and spends time on management options that I dont care about.
Ingress Ebb and Flow
The last Ingress fragment here was back in May, reflective of the fact that I, like many who leveled all the way up, lost interest and drifted away. But Ive been out a bit in the last couple of weeks; in particular spending quality time in graveyards. the game remains an interesting and under-reported story. Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, Advanced Ingress, and Ingress Chase Scene. Where we play Ingress; for details, read on. Time and numbers Thats what the games about; in any given locality, the faction that can bring out more L8 players for more hours is going to dominate the map.
Ingress Ebb and Flow
The last Ingress fragment here was back in May, reflective of the fact that I, like many who leveled all the way up, lost interest and drifted away. But Ive been out a bit in the last couple of weeks; in particular spending quality time in graveyards. the game remains an interesting and under-reported story. Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, Advanced Ingress, and Ingress Chase Scene. Where we play Ingress; for details, read on. Time and numbers Thats what the games about; in any given locality, the faction that can bring out more L8 players for more hours is going to dominate the map.
City of Trees and Cranes
Vancouver I mean, of course. Were big on trees, and growing, so its hard to take a picture without one or the other. What happened was, we were at a rooftop barbecue more or less at the center of this map; the area is called False Creek Flats , a label I love. Its mostly empty space on the map north of where we were, which however isnt empty in the slightest. Theres a lot happening here. Id like to draw your attention to: The new brewery under construction in the foreground; Red Truck Beer, and some of their beers arent bad.
City of Trees and Cranes
Vancouver I mean, of course. Were big on trees, and growing, so its hard to take a picture without one or the other. What happened was, we were at a rooftop barbecue more or less at the center of this map; the area is called False Creek Flats , a label I love. Its mostly empty space on the map north of where we were, which however isnt empty in the slightest. Theres a lot happening here. Id like to draw your attention to: The new brewery under construction in the foreground; Red Truck Beer, and some of their beers arent bad.
Sony RX100 II
I lost my much-beloved Canon S100 by leaving it on an airplane how stupid is that? so I got the new RX100 II (Sony, DPR, Sony); also called the M2 in places including its photos EXIF data, but II seems more official. The choice was easy, given my previously-stated belief that the best camera inventory is a large-sensor interchangeable-lens body wearing an opinionated prime lens, and a decent pocket cam with a zoom: If you really need a zoom lens, why not get one that has a pretty good camera built-in? . And many reviewers have asserted that the RX100 is the best pocket zoom you can get.
Sony RX100 II
I lost my much-beloved Canon S100 by leaving it on an airplane how stupid is that? so I got the new RX100 II (Sony, DPR, Amazon); also called the M2 in places including its photos EXIF data, but II seems more official. The choice was easy, given my previously-stated belief that the best camera inventory is a large-sensor interchangeable-lens body wearing an opinionated prime lens, and a decent pocket cam with a zoom: If you really need a zoom lens, why not get one that has a pretty good camera built-in? . And many reviewers have asserted that the RX100 is the best pocket zoom you can get.
CL XXVII: Cheap Audio
Weve finally arranged, after five full years of Cottage Life, for music playback. There were complicating factors, notably my being a deranged audiophile; and the installation isnt 100% complete. But it sounds nice, and Ive already saved $259,404.01! Downstream Wed always wanted music and, within the first year or so, snapped up a pair of PSB Alpha B1s. From time to time, people who notice how nice the music sounds at our place ask me what they should buy, and I often begin with there are loads of options, but if you just buy whatever PSB speakers and NAD electronics fit in your budget, youll be pretty happy. Anyhow, PSB has been selling variations on the Alpha for a really long time, usually at a price point around $299/pair; stupidly good for the money.
CL XXVII: Cheap Audio
Weve finally arranged, after five full years of Cottage Life, for music playback. There were complicating factors, notably my being a deranged audiophile; and the installation isnt 100% complete. But it sounds nice, and Ive already saved $259,404.01! Downstream Wed always wanted music and, within the first year or so, snapped up a pair of PSB Alpha B1s. From time to time, people who notice how nice the music sounds at our place ask me what they should buy, and I often begin with there are loads of options, but if you just buy whatever PSB speakers and NAD electronics fit in your budget, youll be pretty happy. Anyhow, PSB has been selling variations on the Alpha for a really long time, usually at a price point around $299/pair; stupidly good for the money.
FC4: Persona Questions
A couple of episodes back, commenter tom jones wrote, urging me to study Mozilla Persona: it seems all the questions you are discussing have already been solved by them. Well, then. [This is part of the Federation Conversation series.] This piece in particular left a lot of open questions in my mind, which appear at the end of the sections down below. None of them are rhetorical and Id like to hear what people think. So I went and looked at the Persona docs, and had some email back and forth with Lloyd Hilaeil, a Mozillian who works on it, and wired it into my testbed at favcolor.net and it sort of works.
FC4: Persona Questions
A couple of episodes back, commenter tom jones wrote, urging me to study Mozilla Persona: it seems all the questions you are discussing have already been solved by them. Well, then. [This is part of the Federation Conversation series.] This piece in particular left a lot of open questions in my mind, which appear at the end of the sections down below. None of them are rhetorical and Id like to hear what people think. So I went and looked at the Persona docs, and had some email back and forth with Lloyd Hilaeil, a Mozillian who works on it, and wired it into my testbed at favcolor.net and it sort of works.
The Tor Danger
If you have a reasonably full life, from time to time you have to look a temptation in the face and say no . For example Tor.com. No, not Tor the private-Internet thing, Tor the sci-fi publisher of Charlie Stross among many others, excellent and otherwise. Its seductive overly so. They feature fiendishly-clever rewatch (e.g. Deep Space Nine, which every discerning person knows is the only Star Trek series that matters) and reread series (currently including Zelaznys Amber). And of course, they sell books. With thoughtful, appreciative, beautifully-written essay-length appreciations. Which is to say, with fiendish effectiveness. And since its so easy to buy em these days, I did, a couple of times.
The Tor Danger
If you have a reasonably full life, from time to time you have to look a temptation in the face and say no . For example Tor.com. No, not Tor the private-Internet thing, but Tor the sci-fi publisher of Charlie Stross among many others, excellent and otherwise. Specifically, Tors Web site. Its seductive overly so. They feature fiendishly-clever rewatch (e.g. Deep Space Nine, which every discerning person knows is the only Star Trek series that matters) and reread series (currently including Zelaznys Amber). And of course, they sell books. With thoughtful, appreciative, beautifully-written essay-length appreciations. Which is to say, with fiendish effectiveness. And since its so easy to buy em these days, I did, a couple of times.
CL XXVI: Driftscapes
Here in the top left corner of urban North America, we have a special relationship with wood. We live in it, sit on it, eat off it, and burn it for warmth and pleasure. Also, as part of Cottage Life, walk by the sea to admire the portions cast up. Well, and ephemeral log-draperies, where ephemeral means from the last high tide to the next. Consider the randomness: Each years climactic variation with input from surrounding soils and companions of every size (bear to microorganism); then after the tree found itself accidentally afloat subject to each waves attentions, the grinding against the rocks, then in stillness the light and wind put the final polish on what you see.
CL XXVI: Driftscapes
Here in the top left corner of urban North America, we have a special relationship with wood. We live in it, sit on it, eat off it, and burn it for warmth and pleasure. Also, as part of Cottage Life, walk by the sea to admire the portions cast up. Well, and ephemeral log-draperies, where ephemeral means from the last high tide to the next. Consider the randomness: Each years climactic variation with input from surrounding soils and companions of every size (bear to microorganism); then after the tree found itself accidentally afloat subject to each waves attentions, the grinding against the rocks, then in stillness the light and wind put the final polish on what you see.
Other Elmores
Elmore Leonard died. He was an awfully good writer; Ive read loads of his books, some more than once or even twice, and regret it not a bit. There have been lots of grateful obits my favorite is by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker and they all say you should go read Get Shorty and yeah, its good, you should. So here are some more that arent usually in lists of his big hits but are really good too. Stick, from 1983, is actually a sequal to Swag, but I think its way better. Ernest Stickley is a loveable guy fresh out of jail for armed robbery who gets a really lousy chauffeuring job for a really irritating rich guy and, well, lots of amusing things happen and, as with most Leonards, you just know, you can feel it, that there are people like that doing things like that.
Other Elmores
Elmore Leonard died. He was an awfully good writer; Ive read loads of his books, some more than once or even twice, and regret it not a bit. There have been lots of grateful obits my favorite is by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker and they all say you should go read Get Shorty and yeah, its good, you should. So here are some more that arent usually in lists of his big hits but are really good too. Stick, from 1983, is actually a sequal to Swag, but I think its way better. Ernest Stickley is a loveable guy fresh out of jail for armed robbery who gets a really lousy chauffeuring job for a really irritating rich guy and, well, lots of amusing things happen and, as with most Leonards, you just know, you can feel it, that there are people like that doing things like that.
FC3: Whos Watching You?
Worried about being watched? Me too. So whos doing it, and why, and what can they see, and what can you do about it? [This is part of the Federation Conversation series. Even though theres nothing here about federated identity, I think this background should be helpful in dealing with the (very sensible) paranoia about whos watching you.] The parties out there who are watching you fall into three groups: Spooks, people who want to hurt you, and people who want to monetize you. Spooks Im talking about your own governments employees. This is the era of Snowden and Manning and whichever ethically-exigent millennial comes along next; so we know, more or less, what it is they know.
FC3: Whos Watching You?
Worried about being watched? Me too. So whos doing it, and why, and what can they see, and what can you do about it? [This is part of the Federation Conversation series. Even though theres nothing here about federated identity, I think this background should be helpful in dealing with the (very sensible) paranoia about whos watching you.] The parties out there who are watching you fall into three groups: Spooks, people who want to hurt you, and people who want to monetize you. Spooks Im talking about your own governments employees. This is the era of Snowden and Manning and whichever ethically-exigent millennial comes along next; so we know, more or less, what it is they know.
Chromecast
It took like five minutes to get it set up. It works. Its great. Its only doing 5% of what it could. The second computer This paragraph here is googlebait for anyone else facing the one thing that confused us (well, my 14-year-old) about getting Chromecast going. After its set up, to enable Chromecast on the second and other subsequent computers, you just install the Chromecast Chrome extension. Now those are what I call some excellent setup instructions. Its not quite accurate; the screen that says set me up actually has abeautiful background photograph. Setup details We have it plugged into the back of the Marantz AV Receiver rather than the side of the TV.
Chromecast
It took like five minutes to get it set up. It works. Its great. Its only doing 5% of what it could. The second computer This paragraph here is googlebait for anyone else facing the one thing that confused us (well, my 14-year-old) about getting Chromecast going. After its set up, to enable Chromecast on the second and other subsequent computers, you just install the Chromecast Chrome extension. Now those are what I call some excellent setup instructions. Its not quite accurate; the screen that says set me up actually has abeautiful background photograph. Setup details We have it plugged into the back of the Marantz AV Receiver rather than the side of the TV.
FC2: Single Point of Failure?
If you rely on an Identity Provider ( IDP ) to sign into lots of apps, here are two things to worry about: If the IDP gets hacked, do the bad guys get into all your apps? And if you lose your IDP account, are you locked out of all of them? [This is part of the Federation Conversation series.] The hacking issue Facebook and Google and so on are obviously big fat juicy targets for the bad guys. And, let me share a non-secret with you: Facebook and Google do get hacked. So does every other site on the Internet. The difference is that big IDPs hire teams of full-time experts to watch the dials, look for anomalous patterns, and run perimeter probes 24/7/365.
FC2: Single Point of Failure?
If you rely on an Identity Provider ( IDP ) to sign into lots of apps, here are two things to worry about: If the IDP gets hacked, do the bad guys get into all your apps? And if you lose your IDP account, are you locked out of all of them? [This is part of the Federation Conversation series.] The hacking issue Facebook and Google and so on are obviously big fat juicy targets for the bad guys. And, let me share a non-secret with you: Facebook and Google do get hacked. So does every other site on the Internet. The difference is that big IDPs hire teams of full-time experts to watch the dials, look for anomalous patterns, and run perimeter probes 24/7/365.
Baseball Goobers
Im talking about the little status-readout thingies that they have up on the TV screen when a ball game is on. Heres one. They present an interesting design problem. The data on display is: Team names: Two, conventionally represented as two- to four-letter strings. Score: Two small integers. Inning: One small integer, plus a one-bit top/bottom indicator. Balls and strikes: Two very small integers, where by very small I mean they can be represented as binary values: three for balls and two for strikes. Outs: One very small integer. On-base status: Three one-bit values. (Optionally) Speed of the last pitch.
FC 1: Who Learns What
When you click on the dark-blue button to sign in with Facebook (or bright red for Google) what does Facebook (or Google) learn about you? What does the app youre signing into learn about you? Uncertainty makes people nervous about federated login. [This is part of the Federation Conversation series.] And the answer is... It depends. Sorry. It just isnt simple. But the single most important thing is simple, and goes like this: You shouldnt have to guess! Since the answer is kind of complicated and depends on a whole bunch of factors, its entirely unreasonable for either the app youre signing into (lets call it the RP , identigeek jargon for Relying Party ) or the Identity Provider ( IDP ) to expect you to know which information flows where.
What Does App Mean?
Ive been Web-centric for a long time, and generally thought of what programmers build as sites . Then I was in Android and what everyone developed was apps . Now Im in a generalist role and, uh, a little unclear as to how to refer, generally, to what software builders build. Its a real problem if you do a lot of advocacy, like me. I often want to start a sentence Suppose youre building an X and you need to... Whats X? Ive found myself forced into klunky constructions such as site or service or app and back-end . Because its like this: Anyone who sets out to build a nontrivial piece of software these days is building some back-end server-side stuff and some browser-focused JS stuff and probably two mobile apps, iOS and Android.
Federation Conversation
I published Why Federate? last week, arguing that apps should get out of the password business. Ouch! I got ferocious pushback in my comments, on Twitter, and on the accompanying G+ post. Take a minute and read a few. Clearly we need to have a conversation. So nobody likes federation? Its not that bad. First, my readership is impossibly geeky, way out on the edge of all the curves. Second, theres a big difference between talking to app builders and app users. Third, even given all that, I got twice as many +1s as negative comments. But Im not going to pretend I wasnt surprised; among other things, I hardly ever hear this flavor of response face-to-face.
Re-Enter Sandman
Which is to say, Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey is out; the fifth Sandman Slim book. The books have a silly theological backdrop, nifty characters (all intensely human even if nominally demiurges or Nephilim or whatever), terrific atmospherics, good fight pieces, and (especially) razor-sharp hard-boiled dialog. Theyre full of gags and erudite-pop-culture references and youll find yourself doing plenty of smiling. Kill City Blues If youre hooked like me and havent snapped this up, go right ahead, its up there with the rest. If youre not yet, dont; go back and do the series in order; otherwise some of it will lose you.
AV Receiver
Being the story of how I stumbled into buying one, and why you might want to also. If youre any kind of Home-Theater weenie youve already had one for a decade or more and you can safely skip this. On the other hand, if, like me, the collection of boxes plugged into the big TV has grown like fungus and the rats-nest of wires behind it has become intimidating, read on. Back Story Going back to 2004, this blog has chronicled our journey into high-def, subwooferdom, region-free disk technology, and Roku. In related news, since Im a deranged two-channels-should-be-enough audiophile, I decided I didnt care about that surround-sound crap; so Id been driving the decent little speakers and subwoofer, all from PSB, with an elderly but pleasing NAD integrated stereo amp.
Oxford Visuals
I went for a couple days for the OED Symposium (about which I have a huge ongoing splodge in progress) and of course took a camera. When it gets warm, windows have to be held open, with whatever is to hand. Well, maybe not; look close and you can see the boot is chained in place; so I guess its ironic and postmodern and so on. Appropriate in an academic town. The black taxis arent a London thing, theyre a Britain thing. But I love the way they look. Loading out after the Gloucester Green market; looks like these dudes did a good days business.
The Oxford English Dictionary
The OED means a whole lot to me; professionally, I owe it everything. My work on it was 26 (!) years ago, but then this spring I got an invitation to their Symposium, which happened last week, and there was only one possible answer. Im profoundly grateful they asked, and would do it again in a flash. This entry, like the OED, is extreme in length and prone to rambling; but, I hope, also like the dictionary in that it might provide pleasure to people who like words for their own sake. The Symposium was at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford; about as old-school inside as out.
Why Federate?
Part of my job these days is convincing people to get out of the password business and start Federating ; that is to say, outsource the login mechanics to an Identity Provider (IDP) like Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Twitter (and there are lots more). Ive given the sales pitch quite a few times now; here it is. Scenario Youre putting up a new app and need to sign in users, so you use whatevers popular with the package youre using: On Rails, typically Devise, on NodeJS Drywall or Passport, on PHP Usercake, and so on. These things will take care of storing and checking usernames and passwords for you.
Good Raw Files
Ive been switching back and forth quite a bit between my two serious cameras, the Pentax K-5 (excellent late-2010 tech) and the Fujifilm X-E1 (same, late-2012). They both have important virtues, but Im starting to think the most important difference is raw-file quality. I have an example. People who know all about raw files and JPEG conversion and so on can hop on past the next section. Backgrounder: Formats and Spelling There are two ways a camera can save its captured images. First is JPEG, a file format that dates back to the early nineties, and still offers a pretty good ratio between data compression and perceived quality.
OSCON 2013
Ive been to this event a bunch of times over the years, always as a speaker I think. But if I couldnt speak Id probably pay real money to come anyway. It feels, for the moment, still essential. Sarah Novotny gets things going. Softwares open-source-ness (or not) seems hardly newsworthy these days. For you youngsters, there was a time when it was controversial, something that mattered, and there were businesses with no-OSS policies, and you felt like you were swimming upstream if you insisted on running GNU/Linux or Apache or MySQL or whatever. Missing a couple of years let me look at OSCON with fresh eyes, I think.
Pacific Rim
Hadnt actually gone out to a movie in a theater for a long time. Then I kept hearing kind words on this one from smart people with good taste. We sat a little too close to the really-big really-loud screen and still walked away smiling, albeit with mild headaches. I think this movie did a lot of things right and not much wrong. Yeah, its one of those movies about giant robots battling it out with giant reptilian aliens, and I recognize that some people wont be OK with that, but if you are, this is a really good one of those.
Cameraccessories
Words and pictures about add-ons, specifically the Luma Cinch (a new thing) and the Helios 44m-4 58mm f/2 lens (a very old thing). Soviet Lenses What happened was, since I got on board the Fujifilm soul train via the mighty Fuji X-E1 and the astoundingly-good little Fujinon XF35 35m f/1.4, Ive been tracking the Fuji-X-rated blogs, where I ran across Jonas Dyhr Rasks Vintage Standard Lens Shootout, where I heard about the Helios 44m-4 58mm F/2.0. I hated some of the more-garish pix in his review of the lens but was struck by its potential. A little research suggested that this product of the USSR-that-was falls into the vanishingly-small category of pretty-damn-good lenses you can EBay for cheap.
Golang Diaries II
I still havent written a thousand lines of Go; but what I have created does useful work and (considering I had to learn a language and a bunch of libraries along the way) didnt burn that much time. Herewith another batch of programming-permanoob reportage. Previously: Golang Diaries I. Illustrated Love Letter Im a Web guy, and this speaks for itself: resp, err := http.Get(uri) if err != nil { // horrible networking error, deal return failure } if resp.StatusCode != 200 { // grouchy server, deal return failure } mediaType := resp.Header.Get("Content-Type") if !strings.HasPrefix(mediaType, "application/json") { // bogus media type, deal return failure } defer resp.Body.Close() body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body) // body is a byte array with the server response Isnt it pathetic that so ...
CL XXV: Work Week
There were two nations birthdays in four days, thus a slow spell at work; so we decided on a solid week of Cottage Life. And we invited all our friends to come for lunch. Friends came, work got done, and photos got taken. Work We have pretty good cell coverage on the island from Telus Mobility and get 3 bars of HSPA+; Speedtest.net says 3.5M down/2.3 up, which is plenty enough for my job. We make a hotspot with a Galaxy Nexus; reliability is better out on the deck than in the cabin, which is a better place to work anyhow.
Spies, Hypocrites, and Fools
There are angry voices sounding in Europe over the NSAs large-scale indiscriminate information-gathering there. Its perfectly possible to be suspicious and cynical about the US spooks, a fan of Ed Snowden, and still think those voices are those of either Euro-hypocrites or Euro-fools. In general, I approve of espionage and yet intensely distrust law-enforcement organizations. I think a healthy civic society should: Aggressively regulate its own security establishment. Worry intensely about overreach and privacy abuse by security officials. Empower those officials to watch its enemies closely and its allies even more closely. Assume that foreign security establishments will routinely try to capture every word spoken and every picture taken.
Meta Meta Meta
On Sunday I wrote On Medium about writing on Medium, after I posted a rewrite there of a piece I wrote about Texas politics. Now lets write about that. At the point I wrote On Medium, my blog had 1250 reads of the original piece, not counting those who mightve read it in my feed. The Medium version had had 455 reads. Today, the numbers are 1560 for my blog (feed-exclusive) and 1700 or so at Medium. But today, I glanced at the stats and got a shock: the meta-piece had 13.3K feed-exclusive reads. Huh? A bit of poking around reveals that those folks had mostly come from a Hacker News thread, where theres worthwhile discussion of blogging in general and Medium in particular.
The Kids and Miles
It was my turn to do the dishes and I needed a little extra energy, so I cued up Spanish Key from Bitches Brew. The 7-year old was table-clearing, the 14-year-old drying, and after a bit they were both bopping along with Miles and the band. I just cant listen to that music in a simple way, my mind keeps going Wayne Shorter just did what? or Yow, 3 measures of pure hard-bop or Ease off on the wah-wah, John . But the kids are teaching me: You dont have to know the subtext or the context, nor need any pretexts, to want to shake your butt.
On Medium
Last week I wrote Texas Politics about the legislative-gamesmanship theatrics around Wendy Davis filibuster. It did OK on the blog, nothing special. Evan Hansen of Medium reached out asking if I wanted to republish there. I couldnt think of a good reason to do that, but then I also couldnt think of a good reason not to. So heres a bloggers-eye view of being a Medium author. The Medium version is Dont Mess With Them and its better than my version, because I did a couple more editing passes and tightened things up. Also, the presentation over there is terrific; minimal and very readable.
Better OS X Control
If you use Emacs, you can stop reading now. If you dont, theres a possibility that you may not be aware of an incredibly powerful productivity-boosting tool that works in almost every OS X app. Read on. Take Control The trick Im about to describe works whenever youre editing text: Gmail, Pages, Keynote, wherever. It relies on the Control key, which is down on the lower left corner of most OS X keyboards (but stay tuned for a trick to make it more accessible). The trick is, hold down the Control key while youre hitting another, for example a , which Ill abbreviate C-A .
Rent-seeking for Nomads
A friend was telling me of a young woman he knows whod been struggling to get by in New York and hed been sort of mentoring. Only shes spent most of this year traveling in Southeast Asia and South America, finding herself . I wondered what she was living on. Turns out shes offering her Manhattan apartment on Airbnb and covering its rent with enough left over to fuel her nomadic self-discovery. I wonder if its even legal? Whatever, when theres something desirable to be sold and people who want to buy it, deals get done; particularly in NYC.
Texas Politics
If you werent watching the livestream (courtesy of The Texas Tribune) you missed an astounding piece of drama. I only caught the last 90 minutes, but wow. Wendy The charisma and eloquence of Senator Davis was astonishing. By the time I started watching, shed been silenced by the Republican legislators tactics and just stood there, watching and smiling. Gaming the System I dont think the transparent sleaze of the efforts to rule her her out of order were all that terrible. The whole point of being governed by elected legislatures is that its rule-based, and wherever there are rules they can be gamed, and thats OK.
Two Factor, Twice
One of my jobs is browbeating people to turn on 2-Step Verification, and its working; more and more people are. Today I learned that weve got some open-source technology you can use to add 2-factor to your own app. Please Get Safe Seriously, if you havent already, and if someone hacking your Google account would screw up your life, then start here right now and come back after youve turned it on. Ill wait. What, you didnt do it? Youre not convinced? You think itll be inconvenient? Wrong. Its super-smooth; every so often, when Google asks you to refresh your login, itll ask you to enter a number that we send you by SMS.
Horror Story
I just read Neil Gaimans The Ocean at the End of the Lane and its wonderfully done but I didnt enjoy it. Theres a good chance you might, though. Gaiman is one of the very few writers whose books I just go ahead and buy without waiting to read reviews or even sniffing the social-media fumes. This book wont change that even though it made me unhappy. Gaimans in good form, so the magic here is magical, the people are real (except for the ones that arent supposed to be), the monsters are monstrous, and the ambiance is intensely felt: You are there.
3 Camera Reviews
Its a wonderful time in the camera biz, with new device flavors grabbing market share all over the place. Ive made my bet on the Fujifilm X series, so lets start with a 2-parter over at The Online Photographer, Fuji X-E1: The Keeper (Part I) and Part II. Theres not that much new information here, but its fun piece to read. For something completely different, check out this early DPReview look at the Galaxy NX, Samsungs big serious camera thats also an Android Jellybean device. Im sure theres photographic gold in them thar hills somewhere. At the moment I have no urge to abandon Fujis diminutive form factor and fabulous Fujinon lenses, but if I get an idea for an Android app that uses the camera hardware, that could change fast.
Feature Phone
My Galaxy Nexus unfortunately Died The Death. Itll boot and seem to work, but as soon as you try to open an email or whatever, kiss it goodbye. So I rummaged through the back of the closet and, well, its amazing how little you can get by with. Id like to replace the GNexus with one of those pure-Android HTC Ones theyre talking up, but you cant get those yet so I needed a stopgap. The closet yielded an old Nexus S which I put my SIM in and turned on; up come some antique Android version. Also, it was broken; probably this is some best-forgotten engineering build from three years ago.
Golang Diaries I
Some of the most popular things on this blog have been diaries Ive written as I explore my way through a new technology or hobby. Im picking up the Go Programming Language, whose HQ is (significantly) at golang.org and which Im going to refer to as Golang for reasons which should become obvious. Whatever you thing of Golang, its apparently got some momentum and some seriously smart people are working on and in it; so this may actually be of service to the community. At this point, I should tip my hat to Mark Pilgrim, who taught me that a really good time to write about something is while youre still discovering it, before youre looking at it from the inside.
Unmapped Lands
I ran across Theresa Couchman on The Setup (always recommended), which convinced me to buy The Unmapped Lands, and wow, is it ever fun. There is a whole lot of stuff in this book; probably more than really necessary, because the people in it are so interesting. I was actually sort of hoping Ms Couchman would ease off on the action a bit and just run with them a bit, but I never wasnt entertained. Lets see, we start with a hardass witch in Albany, NY, and then we get a demon and a smart rat and an Intuitive and a Magician and an alternate-reality portal and a grimoire and dragons and giant spiders and, yeah, theres more, but you get the idea.
findIDP Tech Choices
Im building a service that uses a bunch of heuristics to, given an email address, figure out which Identity Provider (IDP) you should try to use to log that address in. Im doing it in Go. Heres why. The Context You can read about about the whys of the thing in Project findIDP. But heres the how: You get an email address. You do a whole bunch of network retrievals; glance at the domains MX record, try WebFinger, ask some well-known providers whether they host the domain. People can go online and select their own IDP for email addresses they control.
Good Internet Baseball
I was in OpenID meetings at Microsoft all day Tuesday, and started driving home to Vancouver at 4PM. This a fairly painful route at that time, but the Blue Jays and White Sox, via MLB on the Nexus 7, reduced the pain considerably. The problems included an accident on 405 (but theres always an accident on 405) and that Skagit-river bridge that fell down last month (but the detour isnt terrible). Still, a lot of stop-and-go. If you could just keep going you could do the trip in under 3 hours; it took me a just over 4. So right there in the Microsoft parking lot, I pulled up the MLB app on the N7 and checked out what was on; then tuned into the Toronto pre-game show.
Native Mock Orange
Wikipedia does not list this among the common names of Philadelphus_lewisii but thats what we call it. At the moment it is a wild eruption of blossoms and perfume, actually managing to outshine the roses, which are in full-on attack mode too. The flowers are too many to count. Since they are mostly white, they wear the colors the sun drapes them with, depending on the time and the angle.
Project findIDP
What happened was, I got an invite to Poetica, the new startup by Good Internet People Blaine and Maureen. (Poetica has a strong central idea and is aesthetically a treat.) The login experience was unlike anything Id seen. The screen had just one blank space: Type your email address. So I picked my address at our textuality.com family domain, where mail happens to go through Google apps. The next thing I saw was the approval screen from Google saying OK to use your identity to log into Poetica? Then there I was, signed-in and seeing the new-user experience. Very, very slick; and of course no passwords involved.
Civilization
Im writing this in the library at Renfrew Park Community Centre, waiting while my sons at a martial-arts class. Just walking in here, I got all choked up. I guess most places in North America have these scattered around. Quite likely lots of other places round the world too, only Ive never been to any because theyre emphatically for locals, usually. Theyre where you find gyms and meeting rooms and swimming pools and rinks and libraries, in some combination. In Vancouver, theyre pretty well all busy all the time. There are aerobics and yoga and swimming and karate and committees happening here.
The Scalzi/Amazon Trap
I kind of liked The Androids Dream and Redshirts by John Scalzi. A couple weeks ago I needed some light-ish reading so I picked up Old Mans War, and the jaws closed on my wallet. Its the first book of a multi-part space-opera series. The aliens are mostly satisfactorily evil, the solution to the impossibility-of-coherent-space-opera problem is clever, and the people in the stories are interesting. There are irritants for example, the only character so far to suggest, you know, talking to the aliens before shooting, is reviled as a blowhard and quickly disposed of. But still, good story, clever premise, and I confess to enjoying space opera.
Blogginess
Paul Kedrosky, highly visible Internet/Money guy, tweets: So strange to see people talking about future of blogs in 2013. Blogs still exist? (His own blog is now just a daily tweetpendium.) Pauls smart, but thats ridiculous. Just to warm up, heres some recent random blog brilliance, harvested from less-than-a-month-old tabs in the nearest browser. Doc Searls, Identity is personal. The gunslinger blog, scenes from the wild west. Colby Cosh, Lord, send pesticide for the weed of gendercide. John Hempton, Spark Networks and the strange failure of sex-starved Jewish computer science undergrads... and Practical lessons in assessing exotic risks. What Matters We increase and improve our body of knowledge through conversation.
Hotel Token
An OAuth 2 access token is like a hotel-room key card. It gives access, all by itself without further checking, to a particular resource (in this case, room 238 at the Omni Interlocken in Denver.) Check. Its issued to a particular person, who has to be authenticated first (like by showing my drivers license at the check-in.) Check. Nothing on the outside tells you who its been issued to or what its for. Check. Its not obscured or encrypted, so you have to take good care of it (if a bad guy got it and knew what it was for, he could get into my hotel room and rob me blind.)
Glass Questions
At Google in general and IO in particular, there are a whole lot of Glasswearers, and theres a smattering here at Gluecon where Im writing this. I dont own a pair (its tough to give them to Canadians for legal reasons) but have had a few looks, and am used to being in a room with them. So, a few things seem obvious. Are They Obtrusive? No. The novelty wears off and since theyre not flashing (unless you look real close) or moving, and they tend to neutral colors, they just become part of the visual landscape, right away. Also, they dont obscure the essentials of peoples faces, so pretty quick you dont see people-wearing-Glass, you just see people.
IO in the Rearview
I enjoyed it more than any other so far. More APIs, less hardware. More sessions, each shorter. One keynote. Scale IO has been at Moscone West, its attendance thus capped at five-thousand-and-change people, for a while now. I predict it stays that way. Yeah, it sells out instantly and we could probably draw five times that number. All this is true of Apples WWDC too; In Unknowable, Rands says smart things about the advantages of smaller size. Moscone West, about as crowded as its legally possible for it to be, and its still a pretty decent space. But theres another factor; its really hard to grow much over 5-6K because then you dont fit in Moscone West, which is a reasonably light, airy, pleasant space; see above.
Ingress Chase Scene
I hadnt been out to play in a long time, but I heard of a cross-faction event at IO, and Id never done one of those. It got way out into crazy-space; Even non-players might enjoy the story. Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, and Advanced Ingress. Steve at the Diamond My Tuesday plane to San Fran was late so I missed the geek dinners. Restless, I checked the Ingress map and discovered there was a major level-8-portal farm down around the ballpark. Thus a late-evening walk round the diamond by the bay, admiring the waves twinkles.
Fun at IO
There is a conscious effort to make Google IO not just an information-dense environment, but a party. I joined in the fun for all three evenings I was free in San Fran. This included one photo-walk, one rock & roll performance, and one cross-faction Ingress event. Here are words and pictures. Photo Walk As in, the Google+ San Francisco PhotoWalk with Thomas and Trey, where T&T are short for Thomas Hawk and Trey Ratcliff, two photogs of renown at least on G+. Over a thousand people signed up and a few hundred actually turned up. I heard 400-ish which, if true, means that each uploaded ten photos, more or less.
Springies
I used to run lots of flower pix; it was almost a trademark for this blog in its early days. Their absence hasnt been a matter of policy; whatever mental subsystem it is that pulls the camera up to the eye operates several levels below the one where I think about things. But the sun was just right after supper tonight. From top to bottom: Poppies, the Rugosa thats winning this years Rose Race, and a Lonicera ciliosa Honeysuckle. Nothing I can say can add much. While on the subject of flowers: This spring in my neighborhood, many of the women are wearing simple dresses in floral prints, mostly lightweight stuff with a bit of swing and float to it.
Springtime Tab Sweep The World
The only unifying theme is that theyve been building up in the browser for months, and are generally consistent with my worldview. Why its OK to hate banks From The Economist, The people versus the bankers, an approachable, quantitative discussion of why banking is systemically broken, and why it would be good for society to inflict severe financial pain on bankers. Who you are and where you come from From Pacific Standard magazine, of which I know nothing, Ethan Watters writes We Arent the World, in which its revealed that peoples cultural roots influence their perceptions and behaviors, um, radically (etymology joke there), which isnt surprising, and that quantitative social science has never really wired in this apparently-an-axiom, which is.
Springtime Tab Sweep Tech
Ouch, some of these tabs are old. Unifying theme: none. Corroding Style Sheets Liking the look of Stylus. All these tantalizing alternatives when what we really want is to take the ship up and nuke CSS from orbit. Wisdom From CACM, The Tail at Scale by Jeff Dean and Luiz André Barroso. Maybe the deepest thinking about large-system performance characteristics youre apt to read in any given year. Git Joy Both good: LearnGitBranching and Git Koans. Emacs Joy Multiple-cursor madness. And, its fun! Eek. Mongo Joy Specifically, High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit. I havent built a high-volume site in some years, and while Ive not missed it that much, I would like a chance to play with some of the new database tech.
Rock and Roll Story
I just finished reading Blues Highway Blues by Eyre Price, which is said to be one of a series called Crossroads Thrillers. If you like either American music or crime writing, you might like this. If you like both, your chances are pretty high. You might want to visit Prices site linked under his name there; its somewhat unique, which is getting hard to be on the Web these days. As of May 2013, his description of Blues Highway Blues is perfectly accurate; I cant improve on it, plus it comes with the audio of one of the songs in the book.
Who Owns Your Pictures?
People are claiming that a new British law is going to allow anyone to steal your online pictures and sell them and keep the money. I think theyre mostly wrong about that law, but in the process of checking it out I ran across some bad behavior by social-media companies. OMG theyre stealing my pretties! Someone linked, with a gasp of horror, to UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now by Andrew Orlowski. I was prepared to blow it off because Orlowski is generally wrong about everything. This is the man who, back in 2004, referred to Wikipedians as Khmer Rouge in nappies and has continued to get attention with lurid Internet contrarianism; which has also worked for Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, and lately Evgeny Morozov.
Johannesburg Noir
Zoo City is by Lauren Beukes, published in 2010; shes written another since then and Ill make a point of reading it; which should be indicative. [Background: I was looking at the bookshelf screens on my tablet and realized Ive read quite a few recently without sharing anything, even though while none of them have been life-changing, a few are well worth the price of an e-book. This is bad behavior in a blogger, so Ill try to run a few short reviews and get caught up.] This book is seriously nasty, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
HP7 Draperies
My Hawaii Problem is solved, or anyhow Im out of Big-Island pictures I feel compelled to share. These last two have absolutely nothing specific to the geography. This appeared by the pool at our resort in Keahou. What you cant see is the banner; it featured the triskelion which thought was for the Isle of Man; but it turned out to be the Flag of Sicily. And sure enough, a bunch of Sicilians showed up to eat and drink by the pool by the ocean. Someone played guitar and they sang rousing Sicilian songs. It was an afternoon thing, over by suppertime.
Advanced Ingress
Wherever you go these days there are Level-8 players, and even the occasional L8 portal. Its a different game at that level. What may be my last piece on the subject; with a side-trip into BioShock Infinite. Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, and Ingress Tourism. A couple of our local enthusiasts got to L8 in less than 30 days play. It took me well over four months, and thats with a few road-trips to places oozing with portals; I confess that when I got real close to L8, I did put in a lengthy weekend afternoon driving around to places in Vancouver to find juicy green fields to smash and relink.
News Fail
So yeah, I sat up till 2AM (Pacific, 5AM in Boston), fascinated by the situation in Cambridge and Watertown. I listened to the police radio online, watched a few live Twitter feeds, and had a couple Google Maps windows zoomed in on streets that Id never heard of but now know where they are: Hazel, Dexter, Laurel. The professional news media knew less than I (3 timezones away) did, but said more; somewhere between nauseating and just silly. I tried a few live-TV streams but the inconsequential arm-waving and flow of bloviation-with-good-hair-on-top was unbearable. And clearly they werent listening to the scanner or watching the right Twitterers.
HP6 Greens
This, I promise, is the second-last outburst consequent upon the Hawaii Problem where my Lightroom is all bulgy with nifty Big-Island photos. Today, shades of green at Akaka Falls State Park. Its a nice park at the end of nice drive north from Hilo, with a worthwhile side-trip to that botanical garden then through the pleasant village of Honomu. The park itself is an unchallenging half-hour ramble along causeways through pretty dense rainforest up to where theres a nice view of the falls. Except for the green stuff was more interesting that the long twisting white stream of water. Like this: Oh, and the waterfall.
Measure the Pain
Learning isnt free; re-learning is paying the price twice. Many of the people who use what we geeks make would like to re-learn less. One of them is Patric King, interviewed in The Setup, an instructive and enjoyable publication. Im excerpting his whole last paragraph but the rest is good too: I would love to see a return to a longer turnaround between software packages. Theres an artificial churn happening in how quickly we need to re-learn tools, because companies are learning to move their software products to a subscription basis. I am seriously tempted to jump off that bandwagon, if I were confident I could find a workflow and OS that wouldnt be painful to re-learn on a bi-annual basis, rather than every six months.
HP5 Lava Context
Having bombarded you with lava pix while dealing with my need-to-overshare Hawaii Problem, I thought itd be nice to show the story of where the hot rock came from. Lets take that literally; all those glowing-lava pix were part of what the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory calls the Peace Day flow from Pu`u `O`o vent (check out the nifty Recent Kilauea Status page). Heres its path down Kilaueas side to the sea. You might have to enlarge the photo to see the line of plumes: volcanic smoke, steam, and burning vegetation. The black-and-white version of that photo is remarkably dramatic, but Im storytelling here and this one has more truth.
HP4 Botanicals
Botanical gardens are A Good Thing. If you havent been to any, you should rectify that soonest. If you get to Hawaiis Big Island, you should definitely drive north from Hilo and visit the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. In this entry, the Hawaii-Problem you-gotta-see-these-pix monotony is relieved by sex. Even if youre not a botanical-garden sort of person, you might want to take Route 19 north from Hilo anyhow, because its beautiful, lush, country. Along the way, its worth stopping at Alae cemetery, which has one of the most remarkable trees anywhere. Then you turn off on Old Mamalahoa Highway, and the scenery suddenly gets even more intense.
HP3 More Hot Lava!
I wrote about hiking across hard lava to poke a stick into hot lava, and the pictures were groovy, but I had more than I could squeeze in there, so here are the rest that are worthwhile. Those who dont sympathize with my Hawaii Problem (the urge to force recent-vacation pictures down the worlds throat) will be happy to hear that there are only a couple more instalments after today. Here are the pictures. I really have nothing to add to what I wrote before. Well, once again: Go see this if you get a chance.
HP2 The Last Palms
The Hawaii Problem is when you come back from there with an irresistible urge to show off your pictures. Today, some lonely palm trees. Highway 130 heads south and west across the bottom right corner of the Big Island, then along the south coast. Chain of Craters Road heads down from Volcano National Park to the south coast and eventually meets 130. Except for starting in 1986, the lava flowed down the mountain and broke the link. The eastern end of the breakage is where you park your car and start hiking if you want to poke a stick into live flowing lava.
HP1 Sea Turtles
HP stands for Hawaii Problem , which is what happens when your friends come back from it and insist on showing you their pictures. Except for since this is the Internet, nobody can insist you look at anything. Anyhow, I have a few more I feel the urge to share, starting with sea turtles. Theyre easy to see on the Big Island and my favorite thing thats not an erupting volcano. This guy was grazing the tidal pools at Pu`uhonua O HMnaunau National Park, also known as City of Refuge, a really nice spot to visit. Our next sea-turtle is at the famous Punaluu black-sand beach, where they often swim and rest.
Polyglot
Or in full, the Vancouver Polyglot {un} Conference. I saw it coming, thought it looked cool and that Id go, then I got copied on an internal conversation where someone suggested we should sponsor it. Doh, good idea, why didnt I think of it? So we are. So Ill not only go, Ill suggest an unconference session on my current Identity obsessions. Its a cool location and they look like cool people; come on down!
I Bought Some BitCoins
On Tuesday evening I gave an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills to a friendly long-haired young man Id never met in an undistinguished coffee-shop in an undistinguished neighborhood. By the time I got home, the BitCoins Id bought were worth noticeably less than I paid. Why I Did This Two reasons; both seem good to me. First, Ive been working for a long time and have built up some savings. Like they say, diversify your portfolio . Second, its a new (where by new I mean four years old ) thing on the Internet. I feel both desire and duty to experience such things.
Card Update Degree of Difficulty
In Hawaii I left my credit card behind where we ate lunch on the way to the airport. Called em from the departure lounge and told em to cut it up and throw it out. Called Visa and told em to send me a new one. Really pretty easy. Then theres switching over all the pre-authorized payments. I have seven; how many do you have? Here is a list, in decreasing order of degree of difficulty, of the difficulty of upgrading your credit card details. Stupid Website Extreme Pain Example: My cable/Internet provider. Various kinds of obstacles and roadblocks, just generally horribly bad UX.
On ID Tokens
These are a product of the OpenID Connect work, and I think theyre going be super-useful; in fact I keep getting ideas for nifty things you could do with them. So heres a walk-through on what they are and how they work; maybe youll have some ideas too. What They Are ID Tokens are little chunks of text which claim that some particular person wants to tell some particular party out there that theyre signed in and authenticated by the Identity Provider that issued the token. There are some more goodies in there, but thats the big deal. ID Tokens are easy to understand and cheap for programmers to process.
Hem
Currently listening to: Departure and Farewell by Hem; there was a plug in the New Yorker with a nice video sample so I checked out the site and there was the album for sale, lossless format, fair price; why wouldnt I just buy it instantly? Now, not every band is gonna get noticed in the New Yorker; but if you get noticed somewhere, and you have a nice sample, and your site will sell me the music, uncompressed, with a couple of clicks, Im probably gonna buy it right there. And I dont think Im that eccentric. The songs are very pretty and Sally Ellysons singing has got to touch your heart if you have one.
Ingress Tourism
The game still feels like a big story to me, and still under-reported; so herewith Ingress coverage, featuring tourism, community cancer, client controversy, and tactical tips. With pictures of places Ingress players see. Previously in this series: Ingress Weekly, Ingress, Month 3, Things About Ingress, and Ingress. Tourism Im still not a serious player; you cant be one of those with a job and family and so on. But I travel a lot. Last time out, I mentioned the fun Id had playing Ingress in London. Ditto for Tokyo, ditto ditto for the Big Island. I guess if theres an Ingress-photography genre, its gonna be mostly cellphone photos.
Tropical Mirrorless Research
I claim that watching people photograph the Big Island is effective camera-futures research; and camera futures are interesting now. So heres some research. Oh, and Big Island photos. Those camera futures became interesting with the arrival, this past few years, of mirrorless and other compact-format high-quality cameras (overview here). Check out I've Got Good News, I've Got Bad News for some data on sales trends; it suggests SLRs are doing well but compacts arent much of a factor. At the Pu»uhonua o HMnaunau (City of Refuge)park, a must-see on the Big Island. Why Hawaii? People go to the Big Island to see things.
Being Google
This month saw my 3-year anniversary here, and I feel like one of my missions is to be a guide on this Magical Mystery Tour. So, here are some things about Google; without asking anyone first, because not asking first is best. Being Careful Startups are all damn-the-torpedos and ship-it-now. Been there, done that, loved it. Inappropriate with a user count on the order of a billion. My first-ever push to Googles webspace was a couple of paragraphs of documentation; the compulsory review process ended up with four rewrites involving input from three people. Not management-driven cover-your-ass rewrites, either; topics of debate included what is the actual failure mode? and Dont talk abstractly about developers, say You must... Code reviews are way fiercer.
Finite Surface Integral of the Earth
I have watched the piecewise creation of the world; new pieces burn gold-red, creep into place like honey, lethally hot in the ocean-moist air. And of course took lots of pictures. Back Story I owe this experience to one of the many photographers on Google+, who posted on shooting lava. Since wed planned a vacation to the Big Island you can bet this caught my attention. Id visited the island and the volcano a couple of times, but live lava always seemed something that you had to be an extreme-hiking fanatic, and prepared to die in the attempt, to see.
X-E1@q¬: Still Water
I bought a ticket on the Tokyo airport bus leaving from near the Google office and thought my fun with the new camera was over; but I was wrong. A half-hour wait provoked a random stroll which brought me to a little teeny shrine down a little teeny alley. I guess I should conclude this series with some more reportage on the camera, but hey, the most important thing isnt that, because theyre all pretty good these days. What matters is finding something worth pointing it at. Most times, all you really need is for the camera to get out of the way.
X-E1@q¬: Wheels
Ah, the camera and the motorized vehicle; both blossomed last century but are going strong. Lets apply the first to the second and do it with a new camera in Tokyo. Whats not to like? Shameless plug: Includes my personal favorite picture in this series. This is a random lucky capture in Shibuya, which has come to inhabit its own mythology. I dont make a point of going there any more when I visit Tokyo but somehow I always do anyhow, and then I smile because for a place featuring vertical concrete and a trillion or so watts of synthetic illumination, its awfully human.
Sex Education
My turn in the carpool schedule. Girl and Boy in the back seat, my first-grade daughter and her classmate whos expecting a little sister any day now. Girl: Daddy, how do they know whether its a boy or a girl before its born? Me: [Tries to explain about ultrasound (as if I understood it) and how they can see a not-very-good picture of the baby, still in Mummys tummy.] [Silence] Girl: But how do they know if its a boy or a girl? Me: Well, they look to see if it has a penis! [Longer silence.] Boy: Did you know that when a babys born, its naked? [Still longer silence.]
X-E1@q¬: Shades of Grey
Im a color guy; but some pictures cry out for B&W. These are both from Kitanomaru Park, which I recommend to anyone for a walk, whatever the weather. There are museums about, and the Budokan; if that name rings a bell in your head this is probably why. Also its just a nice garden; the botanically-inclined will appreciate the careful labeling. This first picture in among the trees at the center of this map, and while its not quite as magical as the picture looks, its a pretty nice bit of greenery, a rare thing in the heart of Tokyo.
X-E1@q¬: Gates
The event that took me to Tokyo with a new camera was in Chiyoda, which is to say right next to the Imperial palace. On two successive days, I took the opportunity to go visit; once to Kitanomaru Park, and once to the East Garden itself. Pictures today from the latter. The history of Japan is full of wars, mostly in a feudal flavor; all these walls and battlements and fortifications werent built for decoration. Doesnt mean they dont look good. These are the East gates. I confess, this photo had to be fixed up a little. The spring sun on the trees other side of the gate was overpowering, brilliant.
X-E1@q¬: Cylinders
On Day Two of the new-camera-in-Tokyo trail lets move gradually from people to geometry. Because any city has lots of that. This is from the 20th floor, at Hitotsubashi University looking down over the Mainichi building; in the background are some of the Imperial Palace gardens (more to come from there). I said gradually and yep, if you blow this up you will in fact spot a few people. I wonder what the guys on the rooftop are up to; on a really big screen with the full-rez photo, its clear that theyre pretty well-dressed, i.e. probably not maintenance folk. Maybe they just stepped outside for a smoke.
X-E1@q¬: People
So, I took the new camera to Tokyo and came back with pictures, which will inhabit this space for the next few days. For most, Im not gonna claim theyre typical ; but these are. If youre going to show the truth about q¬, it has to be people. Because its buildings and cars and streets and so on are mostly nothing special, but the people who live among them are. Not far from Shimbashi station and its 10PM or so. I wont claim this is a good picture, but I will argue that its what Tokyo street-life is really, really like; do me a favor and enlarge it.
The Tragedy of the Re-Auth
Were pushing the notion that sites should do Federated Identity ; that those Sign in with Facebook/Google/Twitter/whoever badges you see everywhere are A Good Thing. And indeed they are. But its exposing a subtle problem. Background I spend a lot of time talking to people who are (in the jargon) RPs , where the initials stand for Relying Party and mean someone who relies on an Identity Provider ( IDP in the jargon) to take care of login/logout. Its increasingly easy to set up Federated Login with an IDP, and as OpenID Connect stabilizes, therell be room for a real standards-based RP/IDP ecosystem.
Fujifilm X-E1
What happened was, this month includes trips to Tokyo and the Big Island. And lately Ive been reading about cameras full of shiny new ideas. So I decided to indulge myself; here are way too many words about the state of cameras in general and in particular the one I bought. I suppose this is partly a review of the X-E1, but if you want to know the most important thing (what kind of pictures it takes) just follow the blog for the next week or two. Ill do a pictures-from-Tokyo series that covers a lot of different photographic styles.
Birthday!
Heres an odd sentence made of special words: The Web can do big things for little people and little things for big; we think its really pretty good right now. In related news, this blog is ten years old today. On February 27, 2003, I told the world about this project. (Some readers might be entertained by Is This Thing On? written the next day, about bringing up a new blog back then.) That odd sentence includes only words from among the one hundred most commonly used in ongoing since 2003; including almost all that arent just grammatical auxiliaries. The words found here to date total somewhat over 1,555,000.
New Mobile Rhythm
You know that Android Versions dashboard? It matters less and less for developers. And its been irritating me for months now that the mobile-device commentariat apparently hasnt noticed. Im hoping todays news will help make my point. Lets look at some recent history. September 2012 The debut of Google Play services brought OAuth 2.0 capabilities to apps running on all compatible devices back to release 2.2 (Froyo). December 2012 Google Play services release 2 brought major Maps-API improvements to apps on all compatible devices back to 2.2. February 26, 2013 Release 3 of Google Play services brought a major revamp of the Google+ API to apps on all compatible devices back to 2.2.
JSON Lesson
I just learned (maybe everyone else already knew) that its legal to have duplicate keys in JSON text. But please dont. There are three definitions of JSON. The lovely graphical one at json.org, the less lovely monospaced ASCII in RFC 4627, and Section 15.12 of ECMAScript 5.1. json.org says nothing about duplicate keys. RFC 4627 (section 2.2), says The names within an object SHOULD be unique. ECMAScript (15.12.2) says NOTE In the case where there are duplicate name Strings within an object, lexically preceding values for the same key shall be overwritten. So I guess this is legal: { "key":"a345", "key":"b678" } Gag.
A or A?
When ordinary non-geek people find out Im in the biz, I often hear Im going to dump the dumbphone and get something slick. Should I get an Apple or an Android? This question is getting harder and harder to answer. Here are some things I used to say. Movies, Music, Media? Apple This remains a little bit true; the worlds still playing catch-up with Apples media ecosystem. But it is catching up; Amazon and Google are both investing hugely in providing low-friction soup-to-nuts offerings, and really want to be your books/music/movie store. And I dont see how Apple has a moat here, some special secret sauce that the competition wont be able to match.
The Wrath of Heaven
May it afflict Dupuytren's contracture, hangnails, and other painful pathologies of the hand on every developer who screws with Control-A, -E, -F, -B, -N, or -P in any OS X app anywhere you can edit text. Firefox, Im looking at you (but only when theres a search box open at the bottom of the browser). StackOverflow, Im looking at you. Seriously, you guys are peeing on sacred ground.
California Valentine
OK, so I took these pix on the 11th not the 14th and, whats worse, processed them heavily, but theyre still a love letter to That State. Theyre from Venice Beach in LA, which I think a deep expression of Pacific Timezone consciousness. Yeah, its sorta sleazy and drug-oriented, but Ill deal with that in exchange for, well, that Pacific edge. LAs about a lot of things, like for example this.
Every Year This Time
These little guys show up in our front garden, and every year this time I run photos of em, not that theres anything really new or different compared to previous years; but theyre whispering Spring! in violet and yellow, so how could I not share? Some others were really fully open to the sun, but I thought this family were adorable.
XMLs 15th Birthday
Whether you like XML or not, were stuck with it for a long time. These days, the only new XML-based projects being started up are document-centric and publishing-oriented. Thank goodness, because thats a much better fit than all the WS-* and Java EE config puke and so on that has given those three letters a bad name among so many programmers. XML for your document database is actually pretty hard to improve on. February 10, 1998 I was at some meeting or another at Microsoft, and we were trying to get the last few changes in and publish the final approved spec.
Ingress Weekly
I still think Ingress is the most interesting piece of New Internet Stuff on the current radar. What else is there to get excited about, Vine? Gimme a break. Also I cant write about work until the release pipeline unjams a bit. So herewith more news from the front. Local Power Wow, the real gamers and grinders are all making it to Level 8. We now have ten eights by my count, just on the Resistance side here in Vancouver. So they went out one night and made 29 L8 portals. I tagged along and took photos, but Im only going to show you this one.
Gun Machine
I originally noticed this bearded author, an interesting voice on Twitter and wow, also apparently a collaborator with Nick Cave in Grinderman and on the excellent White Lunar. Oops, wrong. The Warren Ellis who wrote Gun Machine is quite a different bloke from the Aussie-musician Warren Ellis. That settled, on to the book, which is good. Its a New York police procedural, which has been done before; but not like this. The killer is different, the cop is different, the corruption in the pillars of power (thats almost a cliché now too) is different. And cop shows are all about the ambience; does it make you feel like you are there?
Maximum N7
Way back in August of last year, I tweeted Would totally pay ~$300 for a Nexus 7 with telephony & cellular data. So I did; with my own money I mean. You will be unsurprised to learn that its my favorite Android device ever. I got the maximal version, 32G and GSM, which cost me C$309. My Google Play shopping experience was a little better than at Apple, which always wants me to enter my password at least twice; but not quite as slick as at Amazon. Delivery, at a couple of weeks, was a little slower than Id have liked.
Ingress, Month 3
Ingress is into its third month and if any other relatively-mainstream bloggers are covering the story I havent seen it, so this for the record if nothing else. There are strains showing; but interesting developments also. To start with: as of today, Jan. 29, every Zipcar and Jamba Juice location is an Ingress portal, it seems; which feels to me like a news story. [For context, see Ingress and Things About Ingress.] Personal History When I came back to Vancouver from Christmas on the Prairies, it turned out that a few of us had been away and the Green team had pretty well overrun the city.
Spies Love Books
Actually I should have commas in the title because Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan is a book initially about spies but more about love and really mostly about books, and writing them. Which some may call incestuous, but people who read books like books so why not? Just before I took off for a short visit to Britain I asked on Google+ OK, getting on the long flight to LHR in a few hours, and my queue of unread page-turners is empty. What's a can't-miss from recent months? It worked well, and I ended up buying the two recommended by Richard Smith; this and Canada by Richard Ford, which I havent read yet.
How to Think About OAuth
Im not a deep OAuth 2.0 expert yet; at this point that label is reserved for the (substantial number of) people who wrote the specs. But Ive worked with a few implementations and talked it over with smart people, and I have opinions. Summary: Its a framework not a protocol, it has irritating problems, and its really very useful. Real Internet Protocols I mean things like HTTP and SMTP; plug a client and a server into each other and if it doesnt Just Work, thats surprising. OAuth 2.0 isnt one of those; the language of the spec is full of Out of scope and At the discretion of the implementor .
Xly
Heres an assertion: Women arent interested in coding jobs. Its both obviously true (look at the numbers) and horribly misleading, because lots of women are interested and get great jobs in my profession. This piece isnt about women and software, its about how to patch English so we can talk clearly about this sort of stuff. The essential truth here is statistical: By any measure, the number of women who choose to engage with computing is dramatically lower than the number of men. The essential danger is the temptation to reason from statistics to individuals; Men are better coders, so Im going to pick Joe rather than Karen to interview for the job. The Pattern-Matching Problem Our minds contain a pattern-matching engine that is immensely strong at inferring the particular from the general; which was probably an evolutionary advantage when we were hunter-gatherers worrying about weather patterns and predator behavior ...
Geek Beers
Im in London next week for the OIDF Workshop. I plan to spend the evening of Tuesday January 22nd with my bum on a seat in The Phoenix and a beer in front of me. Anyone who has an opinion about Identity or Android or Google or photography or Japanese Metal bands, drop by and say hello.
Dads Ties
My father died ten years ago. Still, its not surprising that we turned up a box in a corner with some of his old files inside, and a nice belt, and these. Dad also liked to wear cowboy boots, sometimes. I myself like a Western-wear shirt. The box had his University transcripts from the forties and fifties, record of employment, diaries, baby pictures; havent missed him so much in years.
Yasutomo Cuben Wallet
In that disconnected time between Christmas and New Years, a famous person in my tweetstream recommended a Secure front-pocket-carry sciatica-preventing über-light wallet... The pointer was to yasutomo2020.picharpak.com/wallet.htm; heres the intro page with some background. The website was lo-rent but still charmed me. I couldnt make out the color choices so tweeted back What color is the STD version? and the f.p. said Colorless, translucent, sort of like if NASA made waxed paper. Hes talking about the Cuben Fiber the Wa-ben wallet is made of, which I expect never to become intimate with since Im a motorboater. But the price was modest and there wasnt anything about shipping charges; generous since it comes from Hong Kong, but maybe not so much because its light as a feather.
Things About Ingress
Im not even a serious player, I go out for a couple hours two or three times a week. But there are lots of stories to tell and lessons to learn; here are some of mine. [Warning: This post will be more or less completely incomprehensible to someone who hasnt played quite a bit.] Climate Protection This game is going to be another whole kettle of fish in the Northern hemisphere when its, you know, not so bloody cold and wet. Having said that: Theres a lot to be said for wrapping your device up in a good old-fashioned plastic zip-loc.
Client + Server - Passwords
This has been live on our servers for a while, but is now announced and open for general use. Heres the short version: If you have an Android app and a web-server back-end, you can authenticate the person using the app to your back-end securely, efficiently, and with no prompts or passwords. Im pretty happy with this, and think that app developers who can use this should. Because your server really has to know who its talking to, but there are few things less friendly to a person using a mobile device than making them type passwords. The long version is a multi-step recipe, but nothing about it is actually difficult.
The DI Opposition
Another pile-on story; this time on David Heinemeier Hanssons Dependency injection is not a virtue. I agree with every word DHH writes here, but I think I have a better example. Tl;dr: Statically-typed languages can make unit testing hard, so People adopt dependency injection to work around this, and In a sort of Stockholm-syndrome effect, people argue that DI is A Good Thing and over-use it, to harmful effect. Another Example DHHs example is slick, but the publish! method includes enough deep-Ruby idioms that I bet its opaque to a lot of perfectly smart developers who think in Java or C# or ObjC or whatever.
Round Silver Things
Compact Discs , remember them? I got one for Christmas, and you know, theyre not a terrible idea. First off, I have to plug the music: Vivaldi string concertos by Tafelmusik feat. Lamon & Bylsma, from 1992. Great music well played, and a beautiful-sounding recording; totally recommended. BTW, there seem to be lots of versions of this one for sale online here and there, some for less than the one I linked to (which I picked because its got the same cover art as mine). For the last couple of years, Ive bought music like this: (My favorite) By download direct from the artist, but only if they offer CD quality.
Functional Programming Wisdom
I dont often dedicate a blog entry to just a link, but this one is important. Important, that is, if youre a computer programmer; in particular a programmer who needs to make code run faster on existing real-world hardware. Which is a minority of a minority, since it excludes most Webfolk whose servers are fast enough and clients are running 90% idle time. But that minority really needs to be thinking about Functional Programming, and if youre not 100% sure you know what that means, you should drop everything and go read Uncle Bob Martins Functional Programming Basics. Its the best short explanation of what FP is about, and why its important, that Ive ever read anywhere.
Two Million Saved
Back in April of last year, I noted that my LifeSaver 2 app had saved a million call records and SMS texts into the cloud. Now its two million, and by a much more useful measure. But theres more work to do and its going to be fun. First of all, people upload a lot more stuff than they download. Im betting its because they forget that LifeSaver only saves your data for an hour or two, and dont have the new device handy in the time window, so they have to re-upload. So, as of today, people have restored 2,033,635 phonecall records and SMS texts from the cloud to Android devices.
Blog 4 $
Andrew Sullivan, one of the worlds most visible bloggers, is going indie and will try to make a living at it. I wish him luck, but I think maybe hes thinking about it wrong. If anyone can make it go, it ought to be Andrew. Hes erudite, passionate, articulate, and has managed, at one time or another, to piss off just about every demographic and politicocultural faction there is. Hes also, although British, a US resident, and member of a faction thats terribly important for Americas future: a conservative whos neither anti-sex nor anti-science. Disclosure I like my job at Google, but at some point Id like to support myself by blogging.
Illustrated New Years Tab Sweep
Welcome to 2013! If youre like me, you dont have too much planned for the day. So here are some goodies built up in tabs & bookmarks since sometime in mid-2012. Since words and links sans pictures are boring, I include pictures, mostly of snow, from our Christmas excursion to Saskatchewan. There was lots of snow! Ive mostly avoided things that everyone already linked to, and I hope that one or two tickle your mental palate. Hint: The best links are in the last section. The Technosphere Now that Im not doing Android full-time, I dont even have to think about telephone companies, and thats nice.
For Everyone
Our family gathering is small this year; only five. Even at that size, when everyone likes the same book, thats remarkable. Im talking about Giants Beware!, a graphic novel by Jorge Aguirre (who doesnt have a Wikipedia entry, someone get on it). All five of us read it, cover to cover, on Christmas day. Granted, my 6-year-old daughter is an unusually good reader, and my 82-your-old mother is unusually bookish and open-minded, but still. The book is funny, deft, well-drawn, and a total page-turner. Its a little tougher than what the six-year-old gets from her first-grade library, and she groused out loud, demanding that everyone stop talking so she could concentrate.
Low-stress Inbox
Ive long been aware of the Inbox Zero notion, and never really got it. My Google inbox has 6,457 messages and my personal inbox 5,096; none are unread and I feel no stress. Recently Ive noticed that lots of people have huge numbers of unread emails staring them in the face, more or less all the time I guess. This would drive me crazy in about fifteen minutes. So, as a Christmas present to the world, here is my recipe for maintaining an unread count of zero; a condition Ill call Low-stress Inbox. You Decide When to Read Set up your mail so that when youre not looking at it, there are no bright red numbers anywhere on your screen pestering you about whats unread.
Wintersun
After a dry bright summer and a forgiving autumn, winter is biting down hard; day after day of lashing rain and single-digit-°C temperatures. And dark. Dark, dark, dark. When the sun comes out, its surprising. It wasnt even really out, just a gap in the clouds big enough for a stray beam to catch this old house. Like a performer in the spotlight, reaching back for a little more. In winter north of 49°, you take what you can get.
Which Cameras?
Right at the moment, the Most Interesting Camera in the World is clearly the Sony RX-1. Its started to hit the streets; for example, check out some early pix from Duncan Davidson. Theyre good! The concept is brilliant, and I salute The Most [well, only] Interesting Part of Sony for it. But I probably wouldnt get one even at a less-stupidly-high price. Heres what I think: You should have a modern interchangeable-lens camera whose sensor can deal with darkness, and most of the time you should mount a difficult opinionated prime lens on it and walk around with that. Also, you should have a high-quality pocket camera with a reasonably big reasonably fast zoom and a sensor thats only moderately afraid of the dark.
Ingress
Its a new thing on the Internet, a planetary-scale augmented-reality game being played on a real planet: ours. Its fun to play, particularly if you have kids. And interesting, I think, for anyone who cares about issues of Life Online, even non-gamers. If you want to know the basics, hop on over and read the overexcited pitch at Google Play and the calmer Ingress in Wikipedia. Go ahead, Ill wait. Back now? Heres whats actually interesting about the game. Numbers This has only been running since mid-November, and its hard to get an invite, but a lot of people are playing.
Gonna Hang Out
Theres this notion of a Google+ Event , which combines G+, YouTube, and Moderator; its trying to be a new way to do an online conversation. Some of the outreach people at Google (i.e. in jobs like mine) are going on the road a lot less and Eventing a lot more, these days. So Im going to try it tomorrow (Thursday): Life, Identity, and Everything. The idea is, I and Breno (an Identity tech lead here) will talk a little bit about what were up to (OAuth, OpenID, AccountChooser, bearer tokens for n00bs, and so on), and I mean a little bit; single-digit minutes.
Play services
Theres a new release of Google Play services, which brings some love to the long-unrevised Maps API, and introduces Photo Sphere APIs. The world hasnt figured out how big a deal Play services is; one of the highest-impact changes in Androids history. Historically, big new features in Android required Framework revisions, which require major releases with updates right down into the Linux kernel, which only ship twice a year, and which arent reliably made available on older devices. Play services allows the Android group to ship major new features (OAuth 2.0, Mapping, and Photo Sphere so far) in a way that is auto-refreshed on all compatible devices back to 2.2 Froyo .
Private By Default
As of now, this blogs primary address is https://www.tbray.org/ongoing; note the red s . That means your communication with it is private, which I think is the way the whole Internet should be. Depending which browser youre using, you should see a little lock or some such in the address bar. On the right are readouts from (top down) Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You can click on that readout to get some information on the privacy/security settings. What It Means The way this is set up, you can be pretty sure, when you see that lock, of two things: First, that your browser is really connected to www.tbray.org, not some other site pretending to be mine.
AccountChooser
This isnt exactly a Google thing, but weve been putting a lot of work into it, and now its about ready to use. I think lots of sites should. Because its easy, private, secure, and reduces login pain. AccountChooser is from the OpenID Foundation, with active input from lots of big tech companies. Its not often that Ive seen this sort of thing happen co-operatively; no discernable jostling or politics. What You See To demonstrate, I built this little app called FavColor that will save one fact about you: your favorite color. Its badge is this little rainbow thingie. FavColor has a conventional sign-in page for people it knows and a conventional sign-up for those it doesnt.
CL XXIV: Autumn Drama
Each years Cottage Life ends when you Shut Down For Winter; this sad task includes tidying, sealing, draining, and then going away. We left it later this year than any before, into the season of storms and rain and darkness. Of course, when the sun breaks through that darkness it makes the mountains and so on look awfully good. When the rain sets in its still very beautiful, but hard to photograph properly. Best to stay inside, light a fire in the stove, and get on with the Shutting Down; also reading, eating, and napping. All of which we did. But when darkness arrived the wind picked up and the rumble and crash of the waves grew louder and louder; my thoughts turned to the mighty ship Bodoni tethered to our little floating dock in among the big waves.
CL XXIV: Autumn Drama
Each years Cottage Life ends when you Shut Down For Winter; this sad task includes tidying, sealing, draining, and then going away. We left it later this year than any before, into the season of storms and rain and darkness. Of course, when the sun breaks through that darkness it makes the mountains and so on look awfully good. When the rain sets in its still very beautiful, but hard to photograph properly. Best to stay inside, light a fire in the stove, and get on with the Shutting Down; also reading, eating, and napping. All of which we did. But when darkness arrived the wind picked up and the rumble and crash of the waves grew louder and louder; my thoughts turned to the mighty ship Bodoni tethered to our little floating dock in among the big waves.
Old-World Week
I spent most of last week in Antwerp at Devoxx 2012, probably the biggest developer event in Europe. The European context was front-of-mind since, for recreation, the week before Id been occasionally reading US right-wingers introspecting on why theyd lost the election and where America is going. A repeating theme is how the US is at grave danger of becoming like Europe; theyre convinced that thats Baracks hidden agenda. And Europe, you see, is a terrible place. A week there, in only a corner of the continent, but among Eurofolk from all over it, and my opinion that the US wingnuts are just wrong is reinforced.
Old-World Week
I spent most of last week in Antwerp at Devoxx 2012, probably the biggest developer event in Europe. The European context was front-of-mind since, for recreation, the week before Id been occasionally reading US right-wingers introspecting on why theyd lost the election and where America is going. A repeating theme is how the US is at grave danger of becoming like Europe; theyre convinced that thats Baracks hidden agenda. And Europe, you see, is a terrible place. A week there, in only a corner of the continent, but among Eurofolk from all over it, and my opinion that the US wingnuts are just wrong is reinforced.
Doe Laughs at the Rite
I ran across an article by this dude Andy Doe, who used to run classical music at iTunes, and then was at Naxos records, called What Is Going on with the Record Industry? Worth reading and worth following links from too. It turns out Doe has a blog called Proper Discord, a large part of which is devoted to silly classical-record covers with snarky captions. Hes so good at it that he got invited to contribute such a piece, pretty hilarious, to The Rite of Spring at One Hundred. Woah, The Rite of Spring is 100? Now thats a good excuse for a celebration; its one of the best pieces of music ever written.
How To Watch Blood and Chrome
We watched all of BSG redux, and even though we loathed Caprica thought Blood & Chrome deserved a shot. Plus its online. Easily accessible on my computer, but I like to watch TV on my TV. Heres how. Buy a Roku. Install a Plex server on a nearby computer; in our case our living-room mainframe Mac Pro. Fight your way through the creaky, irritating Plex channel selector to find and install the YouTube channel. Install the Plex channel on your Roku. Configure Plex on Roku to know about the nearby Plex server. Tune in Plex on Roku, select the YouTube channel.
What Conservatives are For
Im no right-winger but Ive long felt that a healthy society needs sane progressives and sane conservatives, and that many of Americas difficulties are related to an absence of the latter. So heres a proposed Sane-conservative manifesto, written from outside. 1. Be Cautious Anyone whos dealt with the public sector, or even paid close attention to the news, knows that many government programs dont work very well. Some just fritter away energy and money to no particular effect, others turn actively harmful. Its not that those launching them are malicious or stupid; its that people are complicated and, in the societal aggregate, insanely complicated.
What Conservatives are For
Im no right-winger but Ive long felt that a healthy society needs sane progressives and sane conservatives, and that many of Americas difficulties are related to an absence of the latter. So heres a proposed Sane-conservative manifesto, written from outside. 1. Be Cautious Anyone whos dealt with the public sector, or even paid close attention to the news, knows that many government programs dont work very well. Some just fritter away energy and money to no particular effect, others turn actively harmful. Its not that those launching them are malicious or stupid; its that people are complicated and, in the societal aggregate, insanely complicated.
How To Watch Blood and Chrome
We watched all of BSG redux, and even though we loathed Caprica thought Blood & Chrome deserved a shot. Plus its online. Easily accessible on my computer, but I like to watch TV on my TV. Heres how. Buy a Roku. Install a Plex server on a nearby computer; in our case our living-room mainframe Mac Pro. Fight your way through the creaky, irritating Plex channel selector to find and install the YouTube channel. Install the Plex channel on your Roku. Configure Plex on Roku to know about the nearby Plex server. Tune in Plex on Roku, select the YouTube channel.
Doe Laughs at the Rite
I ran across an article by this dude Andy Doe, who used to run classical music at iTunes, and then was at Naxos records, called What Is Going on with the Record Industry? Worth reading and worth following links from too. It turns out Doe has a blog called Proper Discord, a large part of which is devoted to silly classical-record covers with snarky captions. Hes so good at it that he got invited to contribute such a piece, pretty hilarious, to The Rite of Spring at One Hundred. Woah, The Rite of Spring is 100? Now thats a good excuse for a celebration; its one of the best pieces of music ever written.
Sending and Receiving
Yes, this is about social media ; is that still a thing? I depend on this blog and syndication feeds and Twitter and G+, all at once at the same time, and in a complicated and messy way. But life isnt terrible. Broadcasting The screen caps show see my current stats on Twitter (above) and Google+ (below); the nice round number on Twitter provoked this piece. I use them both as broadcast media, and they both work just fine for that. I get the feeling that Twitter reaches more influencers and is more effective for getting a crucial piece of news flowing its way around the planet.
Sending and Receiving
Yes, this is about social media ; is that still a thing? I depend on this blog and syndication feeds and Twitter and G+, all at once at the same time, and in a complicated and messy way. But life isnt terrible. Broadcasting The screen caps show see my current stats on Twitter (above) and Google+ (below); the nice round number on Twitter provoked this piece. I use them both as broadcast media, and they both work just fine for that. I get the feeling that Twitter reaches more influencers and is more effective for getting a crucial piece of news flowing its way around the planet.
Explaining the Election
A pretty well full and complete explanation of the US election results may be found in The Right Republican, published in The Economist at the end of 2011. I quote: Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the so-called Palestinians , to use Mr Gingrich's term, can do ...
Explaining the Election
A pretty well full and complete explanation of the US election results may be found in The Right Republican, published in The Economist at the end of 2011. I quote: Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the so-called Palestinians , to use Mr Gingrich's term, can do ...
Dear America
Congrats on having gotten through another overly-long election. Notes from a spectator looking south from north of 49°. If the outcome is anything but Obama-POTUS/Dem-Senate/GOP-House, were into major-news-story territory, as in how could the phalanx of statisticians led by Nate Silver have been wrong? Seriously, the polls were fairly steady and linear this time around, Bayesian mechanics should have worked. Doubters in need of straws to grasp at, check out Colby Cosh, who points out flaws in Mr Silvers track record. Notably, that his baseball stats-wrangling failed to predict the achievements of Ichiro Suzuki. However, I detect nothing in the current political landscape as anomalous as Ichiro has been in baseball.
Dear America
Congrats on having gotten through another overly-long election. Notes from a spectator looking south from north of 49°. If the outcome is anything but Obama-POTUS/Dem-Senate/GOP-House, were into major-news-story territory, as in how could the phalanx of statisticians led by Nate Silver have been wrong? Seriously, the polls were fairly steady and linear this time around, Bayesian mechanics should have worked. Doubters in need of straws to grasp at, check out Colby Cosh, who points out flaws in Mr Silvers track record. Notably, that his baseball stats-wrangling failed to predict the achievements of Ichiro Suzuki. However, I detect nothing in the current political landscape as anomalous as Ichiro has been in baseball.
That Time of Year
In which northern-hemisphere photographers are tempted to shoot autumn leaves, autumn leaves, and more autumn leaves. Im jaded but couldnt resist these. In Vancouver, we dont rake leaves, we shovel them.
That Time of Year
In which northern-hemisphere photographers are tempted to shoot autumn leaves, autumn leaves, and more autumn leaves. Im jaded but couldnt resist these. In Vancouver, we dont rake leaves, we shovel them.
Four Not For Me
Ive been reading lots this last year (less music, almost no videogames) writing here about the good ones, and mostly silent about the others. But theres this category of books I didnt like but you might, because I think the failing might be in me not the work. As in good, but not for me. Herewith, then, words on Assumption by Percival Everett, Malarky by Anakana Schofield, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Malarky Disclosure: Anakana is a Vancouver Irishwoman and I know her, our kids were in school together and shes been to our parties.
Nouveau Spam
Gmail is really good at spam these days. Its been forever since Ive seen any pharmaceuticals or watches or penny stocks; the very occasional 419 and virtuous-girl-looking-for-friends leaks through. However, there is a steady flow, one or two per day, of intensely-miscellaneous pitches for products or services that look perfectly reasonable and mainstream except for being spam-promoted. Theyre actually sort of, uh, interesting. Here are a few days worth, in the order I received them; the geographic distribution is remarkable. Cheery Spanish condom store. Italian commercial truck rentals. Bright-colored trucks at low daily rates! Mexican e-billing systems. Boring presentation, probably appropriate. Swedish anti-explosive gas-tank treatment, for motor racers.
Nouveau Spam
Gmail is really good at spam these days. Its been forever since Ive seen any pharmaceuticals or watches or penny stocks; the very occasional 419 and virtuous-girl-looking-for-friends leaks through. However, there is a steady flow, one or two per day, of intensely-miscellaneous pitches for products or services that look perfectly reasonable and mainstream except for being spam-promoted. Theyre actually sort of, uh, interesting. Here are a few days worth, in the order I received them; the geographic distribution is remarkable. Cheery Spanish condom store. Italian commercial truck rentals. Bright-colored trucks at low daily rates! Mexican e-billing systems. Boring presentation, probably appropriate. Swedish anti-explosive gas-tank treatment, for motor racers.
Four Not For Me
Ive been reading lots this last year (less music, almost no videogames) writing here about the good ones, and mostly silent about the others. But theres this category of books I didnt like but you might, because I think the failing might be in me not the work. As in good, but not for me. Herewith, then, words on Assumption by Percival Everett, Malarky by Anakana Schofield, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Malarky Disclosure: Anakana is a Vancouver Irishwoman and I know her, our kids were in school together and shes been to our parties.
Cant We All Just Get Along?
Heres the weird thing about this identity gig: Theres no enemy. So who can we blame for our failures? Over the years, for each of the things Ive cared about, usually theres been an Adversary, a big strong scary one. Ive championed Unix against VMS, the Internet against the OSI stack, Linux against Windows, descriptive markup against Adobe, REST against WS-*, agile against waterfall, dynamic typing against the statically-typed incumbents, Android against locked-down app ecosystems, and so on. But, in the world of Identity, whos the bad guy? I mean, seriously, is there anyone who thinks the current username/password miasma is worth defending?
Cant We All Just Get Along?
Heres the weird thing about this identity gig: Theres no enemy. So who can we blame for our failures? Over the years, for each of the things Ive cared about, usually theres been an Adversary, a big strong scary one. Ive championed Unix against VMS, the Internet against the OSI stack, Linux against Windows, descriptive markup against Adobe, REST against WS-*, agile against waterfall, dynamic typing against the statically-typed incumbents, Android against locked-down app ecosystems, and so on. But, in the world of Identity, whos the bad guy? I mean, seriously, is there anyone who thinks the current username/password miasma is worth defending?
Sandman Pricing
Back in September I recommended (albeit in a sort of snotty tone) Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. Shortly after that, I found out that its not just a book, its a series. Ive been reading it but Ive stopped because I think Amazons robbing me. I realized that Id enjoyed Slims company and the dark sparkle of the conversation so much that Id ignore the silly back story and cartoon theology and give the sequels a try. Im glad I did, because theyre terrific fun. But then I noticed people talking about how the book was on sale cheap, like for 99¢; Id paid a lot more.
Sandman Pricing
Back in September I recommended (albeit in a sort of snotty tone) Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. Shortly after that, I found out that its not just a book, its a series. Ive been reading it but Ive stopped because I think Amazons robbing me. [Update:] As many commenters have pointed out, the price difference seems to be because Im in Canada. A few points on that: The un-signed-in browser is also coming to Amazon from Canada, and Amazon knows that. I paid $10.36 on September 9th for Sandman Slim, which is now $1.15. I paid $9.35 for Kill the Dead, which is now $4.65 I paid $4.63 for Aloha from Hell, which is (gasp!)
Twitter OAuth, Easy
Back in 2009 I wrote this little Ruby script I run Mondays to grab the last weeks tweets and publish them into the Short-form Fragments stream here on the blog, because who knows when Twitter might make my history vanish? It broke today and I fixed it and had another instructive OAuth experience. The error message was a 404 on something called user_timeline.xml; a bit of poking around produced contradictory evidence, but some of it was that this had been deprecated in favor of a JSON version. I was a little irritated but not too much; Id been using XPath probes to pull the interesting bits out of the XML, and tweets arent document-like at all, so JSON should be a better fit.
5k: Hard Again
In the mid-Seventies, old Mississippi/Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters had record-label problems, but still an audience. Young Texas bluesman Johnny Winter had never been a pop star, but had one too. So Johnny producing and playing on an album by Muddy wasnt really a long shot; and Hard Again came out great. ( 5k series introduction here; with an explanation of why the title may look broken.) The Context Nobody has ever played electric blues better than McKinley Morganfield. I saw him a few times, the last time just months before his death; of that, I wrote here: He was old and seemed older; was helped onto the stage and performed sitting down.
Why Vinyl?
As an engineer and Internet guy, I feel almost guilty about the fact that I like listening to LPs so much; the technologies used to record the music and play it back should be obsolete. But I do. [This piece was originally going to be the last paragraph of 5k: Hard Again, but it got out of control; you can love Seventies electric blues without caring in the slightest about audio technology.] Im OK with digital music; my big setup is perfectly capable of vanishing when its playing anything produced with even modest competence, and regularly does better, grabbing my attention when its wandered, making me think damn, that sounds good. But theres the occasional work on well-recorded vinyl that goes further: when suddenly, the musicians...
Why Vinyl?
As an engineer and Internet guy, I feel almost guilty about the fact that I like listening to LPs so much; the technologies used to record the music and play it back should be obsolete. But I do. [This piece was originally going to be the last paragraph of 5k: Hard Again, but it got out of control; you can love Seventies electric blues without caring in the slightest about audio technology.] Im OK with digital music; my big setup is perfectly capable of vanishing when its playing anything produced with even modest competence, and regularly does better, grabbing my attention when its wandered, making me think damn, that sounds good. But theres the occasional work on well-recorded vinyl that goes further: when suddenly, the musicians...
Lightroom Hint
Probably everyone else already knows this trick, but in case you dont: You can tell Lightroom that whenever you import photos, if it recognizes the lens, to just go ahead and apply the default lens correction. Go into Develop mode; in the left side panel there are Presets, and at the bottom of that there are User Presets. Find New Preset in the menus, and uncheck everything except for the default lens correction. Give it a name and save it. Next time you go into Import, theres an Apply During Import thingie in the right panel; put your new lens-corrector preset in there.
Help Plan My 2013
The Identity group where Im working now is going to be launching some stuff soon, and I want to go out and talk to the world about it. Im looking for input on good developer-focused meetings and conferences that I should be at to talk and, more important, listen. Subject Matter At the moment, heres what I believe: The username/password dance sucks and doesnt scale, particularly on mobile. People putting up apps and sites regard identity getting people signed up & signed in purely as a tax; something they gotta do, but unrelated to what they care about. Most developers dont understand identity standards like OAuth, or the related crypto and signing technologies, dont want to learn them, and shouldnt have to.
Dont Change Your Hair For Me
For the first time since 2003 Im seriously thinking about switching to Ubuntu. It feels like, since Snow Leopard, more things have been subtracted from than added to my Mac. This syndrome infects product-management groups everywhere not just in Cupertino; We know better; the experience for the average user will be better without that. But there aint no such thing as an average user, and its almost always a bad idea to subtract a shipping feature. In Particular Since Snow Leopard, theres been exactly one useful new OS X thing: windows you can resize at any edge. And there have been brutal amputations (most painful for me: loss of the Apache GUI and the moronic refusal to tell me what screen resolutions Im using).
CL XXIII: High Pressure
I mean the large zone of elevated atmospheric pressure which has blessed the Pacific Northwest for many weeks now, making this past summers Cottage Life a more or less weather-untroubled sun-bath. Me, I cant wait for the rain (coming Friday they say). The huge cedars and hemlock around our cabin are hanging in but theyre hurting; you can see lots of brown patches among the needles. I know perfectly well that winters winds will blow the dead bits down on the cabin by the bushel and clog our gutters and downspouts. There seems no technology that can address this. I was sitting under the cedars and glanced up; my eyes were caught by an odd lighting effect as the slanting October sun caught the boughs and needles sideways.
The Playoffs
I watched more baseball this season than I have in years (partly due to having gotten into Roku and MLB.tv); now the fun part starts. Lets have our own fun with predictions and opinions. Baseball Its better than other sports because they play on dirt! And also, because theres no clock, theres never a reason to run it out. And because the tension in the late stages of a close game; not remotely equaled by any other sport. MLB.tv Its really done astonishingly well; the virtues of baseball and the Internet mesh without any visible stress or strain, and I know that didnt happen by accident.
Noelogofaves
I so enjoy being a citizen of the living and in fact sweaty smelly and horny English language. Here are some favorite neologisms of my adult years. I Was Like I remember the first time I noticed this, in an early-Web-era chunk of trash-TV commentary, and remarking how instantly comprehensible it was. I was like, he really shouldnt have done that. The comma is weak there (but typographically and grammatically helpful), much stronger in usages such as She was like, ewwwww. This has totally overrun the territory formerly occupied by I said, in effect, ... , along the lines of , and related idioms.
On Oatmeal
It has come to my attention that much of the world is Doing It Wrong. This is the obvious conclusion from the many supermarket shelf-feet of misguided Instant , Quick , and Flavored products. Oatmeal porridge done right is a fine start to any day; but like many of the best things in life, you cant hurry it up. What you want is a big bag full of basic oatmeal. The controversy over Rolled vs Steel-cut is lively; supermarket stalwart Quaker offers both. Ive actually noticed more flavor variation between one brand and another of rolled or steel-cut than between the two in general.
Button Button
We were going downtown on a shopping errand and just where we parked, found Button Button (view source on that site for a giggle). As they say, its an amusing little button store, and the buttons amused my eyes, so here are some pictures that might amuse yours.
Colonoscopy
That was the middle of my day. As a result of my age and other risk factors, I now get one every few years, and because Im a blogger, I can write about it; and I feel I have to, because I might save your life. It only takes a couple hours, its not terribly unpleasant, and its an insanely cost-effective way to not be one of the people killed by colon cancer; thats 50,000 or so in the US every year. So if youre middle aged, ask your damn doctor already. You can read a bit about what its like, with more cheerleading of course, here and here.
Android OAuth via Google Play services
It started launching this morning, to every compatible Android device in the world running Froyo or higher. Thats a lot of devices, and even at Google scale itll take some time to roll out. This is a subtle but significant change in the ecosystem. Google Play services let the Android team release significant new APIs and capabilities to compatible devices without having to upgrade the whole platform. One of the first examples is the new Identity tools. OAuth 2.0 on Android Ive been working on this since early spring, and theres a post on the Android Developers blog with details, sample code, and so on.
Typographic Notes
No story to tell here, just a few notes for publishing-tech fans, which I guess is more or less everyone who does Web stuff which is more or less everyone. But if you dont care about the difference between real apostrophes and ' , you can stop reading now. Quotes Late last year I published Better Quotes and Better Quotes Redux, about why you should use real quotations marks, and how to make this a little easier on OS X. Some readers disagreed, but they were wrong. Since then, as a matter of principle, on every occasion I typed a single or double quote into a computer, unless it was code, Ive Done The Right Thing.
Hells Gladiator
I just read Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey, on a Twitter tip from @GreatDismal, whose advice about books should always be followed, obviously. Its long and fun and ridiculous. Our Man Stark is a Really Bad Mofo who might perhaps have been Saved By The Love Of A Good Woman, only she died and he Went Downtown but now hes Back On The Streets Of LA and his Minds On Murder, except for Theyre Out To Get Him First. Well yeah, if you think this sounds a little derivative, clichéd even, youd be right, because it is. But Stark is interesting and a lot of fun to follow around, the plot doesnt give you much time to think, the stage is crowded with deeply strange and oddly believable characters, even if Stark often kills them before you really get to know them.
High-Fidelity Harmony
Ive been meditating about audio fidelity recently, under the influence of The Civil Wars and Jeff Atwood. What happened was, I kept catching videos and radio spots by The Civil Wars and liking them. I thought maybe I should buy some, so I visited their Web site and noticed with pleasure that they sell uncompressed FLAC, not just MP3, so I snapped up Barton Hollow. Its good. But am I fooling myself in spurning compressed music? < !-- Coincidentally, and what provoked this fragment, Mike Johnson, one of my fave bloggers, wrote HD Downloads, which includes a useful introduction to consumer audio formats.
Sunset Cycle
Were heading out after dinner to pick up gelati. Vancouvers been blessed with loads of surprising September warmth, but sunsets now soon after seven. Its like this: Shes big and strong enough to take the training wheels off, but she doesnt think she can, so she probably cant. We tried once and failed; but on the way back from this ice-cream trip, she said she thought shed be able to next time, so Im sure she will.
Cloud Atlas
This, by David Mitchell, came across my radar because of the news around the forthcoming movie. In book form its called Cloud Atlas: A Novel, but thats a bit misleading because its actually six, wrapped up together. I enjoyed it a lot but cant give an unmixed recommendation. Describing the combining structure would be a spoiler, so Ill limit myself to saying that itll be familiar to lovers of the music of Steve Reich (a small group, I bet). Lets just say its clever and well-executed. In fact, thats how Ill badge the whole work: Smart and well-done; perhaps a little too much so for its own good.
Less Pain, More Money
Logging in is annoying and slows you down. My job these days is mostly about reducing that pain, ideally to zero by eliminating it. Google really wants this to happen; here are two reasons why, one general and one specific. In general, wed like everyone to spend lots of time online. Less logging in improves the experience, so there you go; not rocket science. But lets be more specific: Suppose we give you a browser and offer you a challenge like Whats a good mountain bike? or Find a doctor for your kid . In this situation, Google really wants you to type things like good mountain bike or Knoxville pediatrician into the search box.
CL XXII: Blackberries
Leta be honest: Cottage Life is pretty soft. Thats the point, I believe, but... There Are Enemies. Chief among them are blackberries, not mobile devices I mean but vicious resourceful adaptive bloodthirsty vegetables. This story has a happy ending: we beat em and we eat em. In this lifetime, anyhow. The enemy fauna are invasive and aggressive and full of slum vigor; given space and sunshine they swarm open space, sending strong slender stems vaulting over anything mineral or vegetable to occupy new ground, digging deep in soft forest loam, launching new roots from any fragment that touches down, crowding out the native flora.
Whats Wrong With Twitter?
About fifteen minutes after Twitter came on the scene, alternatives started crowding through the door behind it. So far, none of them have really made a difference. Why the crowd? There are ads And as they say, if the product youre using is free its not the product, youre the product. This seems to be the main driver behind App.net. I like App.net, but I dont like this argument, even though I also mostly dont like ads. Youd have to be a moron to ignore the historical success of services which are free, but with (mostly-disliked) ads. The proportion of people reading this who havent used such a service in the preceding 24 hours rounds to zero.
September
Here again, decades since it meant back-to-school for me; but now my kids go. It seems a bigger deal than the New Year, and weighs heavier as the number to come grows smaller. I Hate It The green leaves and young women are still worshipping the sun with their flesh, and I havent had to put on socks yet. But those hours of sun are on the steep downslope of the seasonal sine wave, less of them every week and you can feel it, and were gonna have to turn the furnace on at night one of these days. Winter is coming , like they say on BitTorrent oops Game of Thrones, and lets all just not overthink that lest we pick up seasonal-prospective-disorder.
The Big Picture
A few weeks ago I was sitting in an airplane with mountains going by outside the window, and idly snapped a few pictures. They werent bad, and I wondered about printing one. I consulted with my neighbor Scott August, who when not being an artist has a high-quality printing business, and asked him how big we could go. Heres how big: Thats a chair behind it, holding it up. To my eye it looks wonderful. Its 40 by 50 inches, more or less. I left all the grain in and Scott printed it on canvas and they sort of cancel each other out.
Living in the Future
The other day I got a Roku and some Plex software; now everything in the house is connected to everything, and to the Net, and remotely-controllable from our mobiles. It feels pretty magic. Baseball Arithmetic Wanting to watch a World Series originally got me into HDTV, and history is repeating itself. The late seasons getting interesting, and since the six major-league West-Coast teams each play 3-ish home games a week, I should be able to watch ball after supper when I feel like it. But I cant because the cable companys offerings are thin. Thus, online baseball, for which the price seems fair; so I needed the Net on my TV.
Statistics
Last night on impulse I spent a couple hours scripting and graphing and heres a snapshot of the browser and operating-system market-share numbers as seen by this blog. The big trend is that there are no big trends. (For a while back in 2005-2007, I published a regularly-updated graph of the browser-market-share numbers. But it was too much work, and seemed less and less newsworthy. I have no plans to repeat this exercise regularly.) Platforms Less Mac and more Linux than I would have expected; but whats really interesting is that, in the last 12 months, not that much has changed.
CL XXI: There and Back
Since we became boat people, the tenor of Cottage Life has changed; we go and return when we get around to it, but each traverse is something of An Event. This last weekend, the still-strong late-summer evening sun flooded into the mighty Bodoni, sundazzle dances beautiful on the water but kind of hard to scan through for floating logs and other marine hazards. The interiors attractively retro, dont you think? Coming home, visiting friends tarried with our encouragement; we ended up leaving the island late. The sky was low and dark, the waves high and dark. Im proud to report that our somewhat-antique craft muscled through em with no real discomfort at a steady 20kt.
Feegles
Lots of people I know, including my wife, keep telling me that I really ought to like Terry Pratchett, and Ive tried a few times but havent. Except for I just finished reading the Tiffany Aching books and loved them. The Problem Its just that I havent cared much about the people in the books. I admire the cynical wisecracking, often brilliant, and the sparkling imagination in the literary set construction and scene-painting. I mean, what if Death did have an apprentice? But too often, the sequence Im reading feels like a an elaborate setup for a (usually very good) punchline, and Im not sure that Pratchett actually cares about the people hes put on the pages, and what happens to them.
Kindle is Weird
The Kindle store is sort of like a quantum vacuum; items flicker into and out of existence, and when theyre there, the measurable attributes dont stand still. An Ethiopian Romance Thats the subtitle of The Chains of Heaven by Philip Marsden (heres another listing from amazon.ca). I bought it on Kindle, based on a recommendation in The Economist, and enjoyed it as much as anything Ive read in the last ten years. A tasty Ethiopian dinner at Axum Restaurant in Vancouver Its not there any more. Except for sometimes it is, maybe as a consequence of where I am or what browser Im using.
Blogodammerung?
Jon Udell is blogging less. Gosh, so am I. There are loads of ways to talk to the world, new alternatives here every day it seems. Is this thing, you know, over? Lets count ways to hurl words at the Web: (1) Blog on your own space, or (2) on someone elses, like Blogspot or WordPress. (3) Live it up on a mailing list with a public archive. (4) Go short-form on Twitter (wow, or maybe a competitor). (5) Social-net it on Facebook or G+. (6) Minimize effort on Tumblr or whatever. (7) Try a new mode with Branch, or (8) an even newer one on Medium.
Popular Metaphysics
I just read Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt. Its wonderful; will make you think, and enjoy your thinking. Almost anyone whos bothered to visit this humble blog more than a couple of times would enjoy it, I think. Ill provide a few words of review (just cheerleading, basically) and then dip into a little metaphysics myself; but Ill warn you so you can stop reading before I go there. The Question and the Method The Question is Why is there anything? obviously the center of metaphysics. Because, well, maybe there neednt have been. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers prefer simpler explanations and shorter stories; and what could be simpler than the null universe?
Dreampeaks
A few days ago, I got on a plane heading just south of west out of Vancouver, in a window seat; the window unscratched and unsmudged, a rarity these days. And then there were clouds low over those Pacific Northwest mountains. I say Pacific Northwest because these peaks dreams may be American or Canadian, dont know which.
Best Practices
That Steve Yegge is really good at starting conversations. Everyone including Steve thinks his essays are way too long, but theyre insightful and erudite and funny. His most recent outing, Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, is all of those things, and worth plowing through to the end. Its also more or less completely wrong. Wrong Why? Because, after providing a framework to help think about competing software technologies, Steve says, essentially, Its like politics, were not gonna all just get along, use whichever suits you . But damn it, this is an engineering discipline, and for most projects we undertake, there should be some consensus Best Practices in terms of tools and architectures; where there arent, thats a bug.
Not the Softest on the Block
We moved into our current place in early 1997 and, almost immediately, were badly burgled. Last week, Mat Honan got badly hacked. We took home-security measures and havent had any problems since. I protect my online presence, with similar results. Some lessons apply to both cases. Home Security Our freshly-purchased-but-old house was a security disaster waiting to happen: flimsy external doors and lots of them, no alarms, old single-glazed basement windows, you name it. So in the aftermath, we did away with a redundant door, fixed up the rest, and went shopping for a security system. The first guy we talked to wanted to put dozens of active alarms all over the place, including on an elevated side window, because, as he pointed out, the bad guys could climb up on the side fence and (precariously) get at it.
Three Mysteries
Just some pretty pixels, no thematic or narrative distractions here. I think I know which flower this is. But this plants hanging up in the air and that doesnt look like sky behind it. Mystery. The grainy green makes me smile. I have a thing for white bricks, just cant resist pointing cameras at them. Its the formalism I guess. Only I cant remember taking the picture. Heuristics and the timestamp suggest its somewhere round The Drive. Mystery. One of my kids was fooling around with the camera in the back seat, and I was OK with that because bits are free and silence is golden.
Finding the Ways
I just read The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane. It isnt a perfect book; but its a good one, which I enjoyed immensely because I found a new way of reading. The Book Its another travel book, but about places you go on foot or in a small bo