Virtual Thought

David Heinemeier Hansson, primary creator of Ruby on Rails, is talking directly to me¹:

I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals… If you have any desire working for the rising rank of companies building their business on open source technologies, you don’t want to carry a liability like that around on you resume. Being labeled a 2005 Switcher is bad enough.

“Hello, my name is David and I am a 2005 switcher.”

One reason I didn’t want to switch to Macs in the first place was the smug elitism associated with that particular brand. Great design married with great functionality is meritorious; zealotry and intolerance should be despised. I use the best tool suited for the particular job: the proportion of application development jobs open for Windows versus those for the Macintosh made the choice of development platform very logical. As we reach the point where web applications and SOAs move to the forefront while particular OS matters less then, again, the choice is very logical.

I don’t, like, hate the guy now. Just nitpicking. ( =

On to other nits… Joel Spolsky is espousing the virtues of Hungarian notation in this most recent post. I gotta say that, until now, I’ve only seen Hungarian notation used as an somewhat useless adjunct to the already functioning type system of my compiler. Moving to a weakly typed language Ruby made me even more predisposed to not use Hungarian notation. Joel’s point about using Hungarian notation to markup the semantics of the variable is interesting and bears further thought. So all those anti-Hungarian zealots (I used to be one until about five minutes ago) should start thinking about that too.

To all this zealotry I would say this: at least your favorite programming language isn’t Brainfuck.

¹ Okay, not really directly to me. He doesn’t know me. Metaphorical-like.

Oliver, I know how you feel.

After that last post I needed something to laugh at.

Yeah yeah, I know, the joke has been made before.

It seems that the U.S. government has made a mistake: 38 of the 558 Guantánamo detainees weren’t, in fact, ‘enemy combatants’. However, the government will not admit the mistake: those 38 people will not be compensated in any way for their incarceration time.

They were held for questioning for years and then let go with not so much as a by-your-leave.

Meanwhile, the other 520 Guantánamo detainees are being tried in secret, military courts where the tribunal listens to secret, classified evidence that the detainees will never see. How could I rebut evidence that I don’t know is being brought against me? How could I refute the truth of something invisible to me? Does the 4th amendment just not matter at all? Habeus corpus you assholes!

Legally, of course, it doesn’t: even if they are citizens, enemy combatants are excused from the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. What is going on now is very legal.

So yeah, the world is ending. And it’s our fault. We let this come about through years of racism, intolerance, ignorance, cruelty, imperialism…

Time to get out my boots.

Hopefully, as this article indicates, the Supreme Court will not rule against the file-sharing companies for pulling in ad revenue while people use their software to download pirated music. To me that seems a lot like suing playing card makers for all the illegal gambling going on, or suing gun manufacturers for all the gun deaths, or suing Ford and GM for all the car accidents in the world.

Okay, I know that file-sharing has far greater uses than getting that one Kelly Clarkson song... like distributing digital content over a wide area for free with little resource drain… but, c’mon. The only other large application of P2P file-sharing that I’ve seen so far is distributing new Linux kernels. The only other P2P app that I know of that is seeing any use isn’t file-sharing, it’s discovery with web services… like maybe Jini. Hmm. And, y’know what, some other stuff… come to think of it:

Here’s a few things we’d be missing if the court rules against file-sharing and creates the legal precedence against digital encoding technology:

• iPods – these tiny little devices create a market for distributing MP3s, at least to your friends. They’d have to go
• CD rippers – CDex is my personal favorite. See iPods.
• VCRs – feel like taping that TV show? Did you get written permission first?
• CD burners – you’re just going to use it to copy your friends’ CDs so you don’t have to buy them, after all.
• TV program recorders – TiVO, MythTV and any others. See VCRs, above.
• Digital cameras – did you get permission to use that image from whatever it was you were taking a picture of?
• Photo sites – see Digital cameras. Good-bye Flickr!
• Digital camcorders – see Digital cameras, above.
• News aggregators – seeing as Google is getting sued for this right now this one’s already on shaky ground.

I would have thought a lot of this was fair use… but, under the legal precedence set by this law, maybe not. So let’s all hear it for the Supreme Court which is keeping everything I love about the Internet alive.

Carnegie Melon is certainly doing some cool things in the field of HCI . Their list of research projects has some pretty cool stuff on it.

I have two favorites: Situationally Appropriate Interaction and Project Aura.

Situationally Appropriate Interaction is a way of getting a computer to figure out when it’s a good time to interrupt a human user. Imagine: no more cell phones going off during meetings, no IM programs interrupting your concentration. If they can do it, that’d be fantastic.

Project Aura’s modest goal is to capture that most scarce of resource in the information space: user attention. In their own words…

Project Aura will fundamentally rethink system design to address this problem. Aura’s goal is to provide each user with an invisible halo of computing and information services that persists regardless of location.

So we have programs that know when and when not to interrupt you and, oh yeah, they are helping you to remember stuff.

Last night at league:

The other cool thing is that my handicap is 90 so my adjusted score is 345—high in the league, I believe.

Per Ryan, here are some technologies/trends that I want to keep my eye on:

• del.icio.us – open social bookmarking to see what people are looking at. From the site: “What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.”
• Dijjer – free P2P software that works transparently and is, again, open. If you host a big file on your system simply prepend http://dijjer.org/get/ to the url (like this: http://dijjer.org/get/http://mysite.org/video.mov) and people downloading it will swarm like a BitTorrent
• Kenosis – P2P software built on top of XML-RPC. They seem to have a nice solution for the problem of discovery of P2P hosts.
• Freecycle – P2P meets real life! Instead of throwing something away or donating it to the Salvation Army you first post about it to a mailing list and someone in your area, if they want it, will come pick it up. More focused than simple donation… too bad poor people generally don’t have computers. But it’s a start. (Here’s my local Freecycle group page.)
• Your Redesign Toolbox – a bunch of handy tools for giving a site a facelift
• CSS Zen Garden – a great site featuring the amazing things you can do with CSS while still maintaining accessibility and standards compliance

Here’s Ryan’s original post that inspired this one. He and I were talking about the sea change we’ve both felt recently in regards to the industry. There’s definitely something afoot, some sort of critical mass that we’re reaching in terms of design, usability, plain ol’ usefulness, socialability, open-ness… it’s in the air, that’s for sure.