Recently in Information Technology Category

In my copious spare time these last few weeks, I gave a Tech Talk to some local users' groups in Google's Ann Arbor office, "Test Driven Development in Python: A Quick-start Approach". I was deeply impressed at the quality of technical folk I met there, some of whom had actually written some of the programming frameworks I use at Google. I took some pics of the audience from the speaker's POV, my first use of an iPhone for such an application.

Winston Tsang was kind enough to have taken some of his own photos of the event; I particularly like this one:

I code in Python, I don't gotta declare
drop vars left and right, interpreter don't care
and you'll notice my keyboard ain't got much wear

That's cuz py code is short like your schlong, with typing loose like your mom,
and curly braces missing like geeks at the prom,
all in this lovely little language by guido van rossum.

Patri Friedman
"...some python nerdcore lyrics I came up w/ yesterday while biking home..."
(with express permission)

Mac OS X has always had problems with name resolution... both DNS, id->uid, etc. It's all centralized to one service and that service is buggy.

I joined XXXXXXX this year, but before that I spent 1.5 years running a medium-sized (but international) Mac OS X network. Half the problems we had all were traced down to name service.

The situation gets better with each release, but there are some fundamental problems still. Mostly they crop up with you have LDAP enabled.

Whenever I see the spinning rainbow ball, and no network traffic and little CPU use, I just steam and sit there imaginging a little gnome inside my computer holding the ends of two cables marked, "Don't disconnect: name service conduit! important!" laughing as he disconnects them, counts to 300, then reconnects them.

We must find, and kill, this gnome.

Thank you for listening.

Tom Limoncelli, with express permission

Now this is funny...


exocortex:~/Documents/src/java$ file *
UnitTest.class: compiled Java class data, version 49.0
UnitTest.java: ASCII C++ program text


Charles Hudson has written an interesting opinion piece on the potential of Yelp (which I mentioned recently.) Thanks to Matthew P. for the pointer. Excerpt:

Yelp is collecting a ton of data from those who take the time to rate and review restaurants, hotels, etc. In the same way that Junglee/Amazon revolutionized how people find books and other goods by using collaborative filtering, I can see Yelp (at scale) achieving a similar aim. Right now, the "missing lens" is the ability to filter reviews and ratings based on similar interests. I would love the ability to use Yelp to filter reviews and ratings based on how similar other reviewers' scores are to ones that I have entered. This is something that nobody seems to be doing today. Ultimately, this collaborative filtering might prove even more useful than reviews provided by my friends.

Some friends of a friend started a geographically-oriented business review site, Yelp.com, with an apparent emphasis on restaurant reviews (but an ontology supporting very many more categories.)

I've joined on her recommendation, and have been surprised to discover just how useful it's been already: I've found some nearby places I'd never considered before, and am now using to drive some of my purchases at local specialty shops.

Now, whether Yelp is another Next Big Thing remains to be seen. It's a closed system, with no apparent provision for RSS syndication of the content we the users add to the review base, and relatedly, no leveraging of microformat standards such as hReview, a serious issue (thanks to Mike Linksvayer for pointing me to this recently.)

Yelp seems to have purchased a GIS-oriented business database, and coded some Google Maps integration into their interface. Rather nice, but entirely US-oriented, with no indication they're ready to scale into the English-speaking markets of Tokyo (big expat and traveller population) and other locales.

Speaking of which, I just tried inviting a good friend, an American living in Panama who could be a productive member of the Yelp community, and he sent me back this, reprinted with his permission:

'Hi Russell,

These morons ask for a zip code and won't accept my sign-up without one. I see this sort of shit all the time. When are US geeks going to get a clue the the US is not the world and that not everyone who has internet also has a "zip" code? So Thanks, but no thanks. I won't sign up with jingoistic idiots. Please feel free to pass along my exact words, if it pleases you.

Regards,
Sandy'

Wow. Well, he does have a point. I see this as one of those "We weren't planning to be so successful" scaling issues. Can't count the number of times I've seen this. I think the Yelpers really should have generalized their GIS integration to allow world-wide registration, from the very beginning. I have lots of friends in Europe, Asia, and South America who won't be able to join due to this and related issues. Maybe agitating in the Yelp forums about this might help; I've noticed they do tend to pay attention to issues of interface (e.g. marking businesses as closed or moved) so they may listen. Of course, they may be planning some kind of world-market rollout, but it would help if they advertised that somewhere prominent.

In the meantime, I'm going to use the hell out of it until and unless it ceases to be interesting. It's a much more convenient place for me to bulk-load all those pictures of food and storefronts I take in my travels, more so than the Movable Type blogging interface I'm using here, and since most of my reviews are locale-specific, it's probably a better place for my rants and raves about local businesses (and ones I visit in other cities.)

Just minutes after I'd complained in my latest blog posting about the lack of taxonomies for doing business reviews, Mike Linksvayer leaves a comment to the contrary:

In-blog reviews, no hacking required beyond copy and paste.

In the fullness of time these will be aggregated by someone for viewing in the context of similar reviews. On the other hand, reviews posted at review sites may be similarly aggregated.

I had an offer to get some free stick time in a friend's friend's luxury (pressurized cabin, an aisle between the seats, etc.) airplane for a trip he and the other guy were making to CES in Las Vegas, but I'm getting ready for school on Monday, so I declined. I'm taking in some of the show's highlights by way of reportage, and just saw this on one of the gadget/gimmick blogs:

"Radar Scope sees through walls"

Fascinating, and a bit terrifying at the same time. It's a handheld device for detecting people on the other side of a (presumably radiolucent) wall. The display device looks milspec/ruggedized, and the printed matter pitches to military application, but I'm quite sure they're being pitched to police departments too. I wonder, what are the relevant U.S. laws with respect to using this device in warrantless searches? I believe SCOTUS has already ruled that "standoff" search techniques are not covered under the 4th Amendment.

Two days ago, I bought a copy of "Mathematica 5.2 For Students" from the campus bookstore for $150 after tax. This is the same software that sells for around $2000 after tax to non-students. It's a fantastic package, and I'm happy I bought it. However, yesterday, after having already installed a copy on my home's dual G5, I tried to install a copy on my PowerBook. Wolfram's licencing scheme doesn't allow that: I could either buy their $100/year "Premium Support" contract, which would allow me to run other copies on other nodes, or buy another copy. If I'd paid full boat for the original copy, that might have made sense, but at the student discount, it made more sense to actually buy another package entirely. FYI for science and engineering students.

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

I bought a 40GB iPod about 8 months ago, and have worked that thing like a prom date, using it in my car, at the gym, at school (both for listening & for recording lectures) and simply for walking around. A couple of days ago, I was greeted with the "sad iPod" icon which indicated the unit's hard drive had failed. Though I'd bought the unit at a discount at the campus bookstore, I called the local Apple Store and told them my situation. I was told to come in, they'd have a replacement waiting for me, no charge, covered under the unit's 1-year standard warranty.

This isn't the first time I've dealt with Apple when I've had an issue with their equipment and/or operating system. I bought an AppleCare contract with my new dual G5 a few months ago, and have found that my calls are answered promptly, and the technicians will hang onto the phone doggedly until any problems are run to ground. At least in my own case - I can't speak for others - I'd rate Apple as having a superb culture of customer service all around.

I would much rather see transhumanists delve into real research or produce real results rather than just recruiting "believers". I [would] rather have fewer people working on the right things than a much larger number who believe in mistaken ideas.

...sadly, the transhumanists themselves will be a large part of the faulty advertising that lead humanity astray with outrageous claims, false beliefs, and preferring quantity over quality. I see nothing in most of our PR efforts that will actually help us attain our goals. Having a couple of hundred people join a science fan club worldwide will have little to no effect on progress.

Harvey Newstrom

I recently did some driving through Nevada and California, working remotely from a number of hotels. I loaded up my iPod (which I connect to a Pioneer black box installed behind the dash, itself interfaced with the sound system's head unit) with music, podcasts, and audio books (almost all of it purchased on iTunes,) including an unabridged copy of:

"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 6 hours of sometimes humorous, often surprising and counterintuitive anecdote. I highly recommend it: I do enjoy economic storytelling, from Braudel to Postrel to Friedman Jr. and now these guys.

Anyone else encountered this book or its audio equivalent?

I will add the qualification here that the work does gloss over the correlation between concealed carry laws and violent crime, primarily since the authors took John R. Lott as the authority on the matter... which is a double shame, since there's much there to explore, and since Lott seems to have screwed the pooch with respect to the issue of academic integrity.

Curt Howland has pointed me to a relevant blog entry hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

I needed to my online investment bank's customer service center, which was given on its website in the form of "800-555-CALL", one of those supposedly helpful mnemonic phone numbers with letters corresponding to digits. Well, my Treo 650 smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard with a digit keypad superimposed on the left side of the board, no 3-letter-to-single-digit DTMF tonepad overlay. I had to dig an old phone out of my "sell on eBay" box to puzzle out my bank's phone number, since they didn't provide a digits-only version of that number.

Thanks to Perry for bringing this to my attention: "Rapid Gene Synthesizer Will Enable Custom Microbe Construction."

Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline "Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay". The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.

Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain't complaining.

Johnathan Pearce

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Paul Graham, in "Hackers and Painters"

I mentioned yesterday that Google's Gmail service had given me 6 invitations (they'd originally given me 2) yesterday, and that I was giving them away. I got 3 takers within minutes, leaving 3.

This morning, I notice that I had not 3, but 6, invitations left. I immediately gave away two more.

The thing is, several other people I know have Gmail accounts, but I've been told by some of them that they've only ever been given a grand total of 2 invitations, with no replenishment. I'm not sure why I keep getting more... I wonder what rules Google's automation uses to determine whom to replenish with invitations? I'm guessing that it may be a side effect of the fact that I receive mail from a very busy mailing list to that account. Invitations may be granted in proportion to use. Anyone have insight to share?

By the way - to pre-empt the inevitable request from someone I've never heard from previously - I should add the caveat that I'm only giving these invitations to realspace friends or those of my online acquaintances with whom I'm friendly.

I have some Gmail invitations. I've been very impressed with the utility of my own Gmail account. Any of you, my friends among my readers, want an invitation to join?

I'm seeing the "Ads by Google" sidebar on an increasing number of blogs and social networking sites. Should I add one myself? I could certainly use the money... speaking of which, do any of my readers actually make money with it?

The same piece of software can be both an application and infrastructure. Apache is an excellent example of this. Apache is really Linux’s “killer app.” It runs on Windows and BSD, but the main point is that it doesn’t require Windows, and many machines are built for the sole purpose of running Apache. Apache is an application when I am setting up a web server, but it’s infrastructure for you when you’re looking at my blog.

Sean Lynch

[The tailend of a dialogue with an idiot I witnessed last night. - REW]

> Windows accomplishes most of what *I* need.

I'm sure it does...

> Why isn't that enough?

It obviously isn't enough for you. Everytime the subject comes up you re-route your anus to your keyboard via your forebrain and go off into I Hate Linux mode. You remind me of one of those women who was betrayed by one man and spends the rest of her life taking it out on everyone around her.

e0ts, on a list I frequent

A half year ago, I was invited to join the Orkut social networking service by my old friend Perry Metzger. A half year later, I've decided that it's an evolutionary dead end: for a service "affiliated with Google," it's unusually clunky, feature-poor, primitive, and dreadfully unreliable. I've made a few good friends through it, however, and am glad of the experience, which has been useful and informative.

Interestingly, in the last couple of weeks I've gotten email from a few people I know through Orkut, inviting me to the Multiply network, an Orkut competitor which seems vastly superior in its execution. I'd ignored those invitations, being busy with other things, but tonight I took my friend Shannon Kaplan up on her invitation, and am impressed at the sophistication of the interface. I'm not convinced I need all their features - I already have my own self-administered blog, for example - but for the general public, it seems at first approximation to be an incredibly well-integrated suite.

So, if you receive an email entitled "Russell Whitaker invites you to keep in touch on Multiply," don't automatically assume to be spam. Multiply has an interesting feature - apparently driven by Orkut user dissatisfaction - with which Orkut users can export their entire network of contacts over to Multiply in order to generate invitations to the rival service. Better I should use it now, before Orkut programs logic to block that data export.

Of course, if Orkut's programmers had been sufficiently on the ball to quickly develop such program logic, they'd also have been sufficiently agile to develop new features demanded by their users... such as forum threading up to 1990 newsreader standards, perhaps?

Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support for a lifetime.

Unknown

Looks like that Google IPO I mentioned yesterday is actually happening today or early next week... I can't really understand their conflicting press releases listed here.

Google will be opening auction bidding for its 25.7 million IPO shares in less than 4 hours. This will be an interesting event.

Perry Metzger has whipped up an excellent little Postfix one-liner good for filtering against mail with potential viral payloads. As he puts it, "Who would want to legitimately mail someone a .pif or .lnk file?"