Still going after all these years.
Browsing a Wired.com photo feature on the Internet Archive’s book scanning operation, I was struck by this image, showing a self-contained book press. PDF goes in, paperback bound book comes out.
I would pay for a copy of Cabell’s Early History of the University of Virginia, for sure, and maybe even the five-volume centennial History of the University of Virginia by Bruce, which has provided so much material for my Wikipedia articles. I hope they get this capability on line soon.
I’ve just read what I hope will be the first speech collected in Barack Obama’s presidential library, the prepared text of his address on race that he is giving right now in Philadelphia (New York Times liveblog). I don’t think I’ve heard any candidate in recent memory speak so cogently about problems with racial perspectives on both sides of the color line, nor put things in perspective quite so eloquently. Bottom line: Obama has taken what his opponents tried to paint as a liability and made of it an opportunity for one of the great statements of challenge to the nation, the first great challenge speech of the 21st century, and the first presidential speech to stand alongside Kennedy’s inaugural address.
Excerpts:
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe…
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations — those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time….
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
I was all set to post my favorite Irish-relevant Muppet sketch—Animal, the Swedish Chef, and Beaker singing “Danny Boy”—until the coffee kicked in and I remembered I had already done it.
Ah well. If you’re in a maudlin mood, check out Eva Cassidy’s rendition.
It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this it’s either on or off, not somewhere in the middle.”
I responded without thinking, “Yeah, every now and then we need to be reminded that we live in a very shallow digital layer on an analog world.”
That just might be my first law of the Internet.
In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely understandable to any Internet veteran of a certain age:
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
The comment, posted prior to Spafford’s withdrawal from recreational Usenet use, sits alongside his three axioms of Usenet (Usenet is not the real world, and usually does not resemble it; ability to type on a computer keyboard is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense; and Sturgeon’s Law applies to Usenet). I think the quote above, and Spafford’s axioms, deserve elevating to a higher consideration. They are certainly directly applicable to blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and just about every other online expression of individuality. They may be applicable to Wikipedia, and are certainly applicable if the deletions and random vandalism all too visible from the Recent Changes page are taken into account. They may even generally apply to humanity itself, as formulated below:
To which I can only say: True. True.
I wasn’t able to attend this week’s SOURCE: Boston conference, which my company is cosponsoring, but reading about some of the talks and looking at some of the papers that are coming out of it has been fascinating. A few points:
If you think protecting digital systems is hard, what about analog systems like the telephone?
The number of potential points of compromise is staggering… Once the X-rays of telephone equipment and close-ups of modified circuit boards came out (notice that there’s supposed to be a diode there, but someone replaced it with a capacitor…) we were headed into real spy vs. spy territory. Tracking down covert channels requires identifying, mapping, and physically and electronically testing every conductor out of an area. Even the conduit and grounds can be used to carry signal, and they have to be checked.
We don’t normally think about telephone security as an issue (although given the shenanigans that the FBI has been up to, with retroactive blanket wiretapping warrants, almost 200,000 National Security Letters authorizing warrantless wiretapping in a four-year-period from 2003 to 2006, and collection of data that they are specifically disallowed from collecting, maybe we should). Why? Because there’s an implicit cost-benefit calculation at play: given the size of the attack surface, or the vulnerable parts of the infrastructure, the cost of absolute security is staggering.
But very few people bother to follow that thought to the logical conclusion, which is that the optimum number of security violations is greater than zero. I’m not recommending hacks, mind, but if you use a cost-benefit approach to analyze security spending, you are constantly trading the cost of protection vs. the cost of attacks. If you spend so much on security that there are no breaches, you have spent more than warranted by the cost of the attack. Dan Geer makes this argument neatly, in graphical form, in the opening of his article “The Evolution of Security” in ACM Queue. The whole article is worth digesting and mulling over. He points out that as our networked world gets more complex, we start to replicate design patterns found in nature (central nervous systems, primitive immune systems, hive behavior) and perhaps we ought to look to those natural models to understand how to create more effective security responses.
Getting back to SOURCE: Boston, Geer’s keynote there amplified some of his points from the Evolution paper and addressed other uncomfortable thoughts. Such as:
Geer closes his talk by bringing back the question of how much security we want. If the cost of absolute security is absolute surveillance, of having one&rsquo’s computer routinely 0wnz0r3d by one’s chosen e-commerce sites, then perhaps we need to be prepared to tolerate a little insecurity. Maybe the digital equipment of telephone equipment boxes “secured” with a single hex bolt makes sense after all.
This is one of those days.
Nothing’s really wrong. I’m just weary of winter. The sun is out and I’m not out there. I really, really want to put my snowblower in the back of the garage and pull the grill to the front.
When I came to my new company, I didn’t mind going from Vista back to Windows XP. There were a few tools and features that I missed, but ultimately one version of Windows isn’t too much different than another.
But I would have caused a serious uproar if I had to use something other than Office 2007.
It’s pretty rare for me to feel passionate about Office software. The last version of Word that I really, really liked was probably Word 5.1a for the Mac, back in 1992. After that I got proficient with some newer features, most notably working with references and TOC formatting for an 800 page software design book that I put together from individual documents in a ridiculous amount of time back in the late 90s. But it got harder and harder to like Word, and I found the time I spent typing in plain old text boxes on the Web to be a refreshing change. I even adopted Notepad and other text editors as my quick writing tool of choice, and still find I prefer working in plain text to having to think about formatting as I write.
So what changed my perception of Office? Why am I no longer afraid to set foot in Word? Why do I actually evangelize PowerPoint 2007? I think the answer is that the Office team, Jensen Harris among them, sat down and looked seriously at how people used, or didn’t use, Office, and made some hard choices about how to change the software to fix what they found.
Jensen had a great presentation at Mix that explains the process that the Office team used to come up with the new Ribbon-centered design for Office 2007. I’ve only looked at the slides so far, not the actual video, but by themselves they’re pretty inspiring.
What are the takeaway principles? I think the outline of the presentation spells it out:
I’m excited about Jensen’s summation of the experience because it is high-visibility verification that structured software design matters. It’s a great story to tell your management team, your development team, or that guy in QA who complains about changes to the screens.
I already know this approach works because I’ve used it, or at least a subset of it. At my last gig, this is what our design process looked like for our last release:
The process isn’t rocket science, but it works, and so will your product if you think honestly about every step along the way.
Every now and then, you lose one of the truly influential people in your life. Earlier this year, it was my grandfather. Last week, I got word that another one had passed on: Myrtle Talbott, who taught my once-a-week TAG class when I was in fourth and fifth grade, who was a longtime member of my church, and who was the first teacher I had who really stretched me.
Picture this: I’m in elementary school, glasses and so uncoordinated they give me extra time in the gym outside of classes so I can learn how to do something athletic without falling over. I’ve been through third grade and the teachers are so tired of trying to keep me engaged that they shift me off in the corner with a book. Then fourth grade starts and they round me up with a few other kids, put us on a bus, and send us to another school halfway across town, where Ms. Talbott waits for us, along with a Spanish teacher, CPR practice, creative writing instruction, real-life biology and science, and a bunch of kids who didn’t seem to mind that I was so odd. And she wouldn’t let me just slide by on glibly knowing the answers. Indeed, she was the first teacher I had who gave me an inkling of that uncomfortable truth: sometimes there are no right answers, only tough questions.
Later I saw her all the time in church, but I never made that connection again. She had already put me on the path and I needed to find my own way from there. But I still wish I had been able to come back and see her before she passed away. I don’t think I ever really thanked her for everything she did for me.
So if you see this and were one of her students, stop in at the guestbook and leave a tribute, won’t you? It seems a shame to leave it empty.
Apple has posted its application form for the new iPhone enterprise tools, whatever they are (Apple has been awfully nonspecific on that point). This is cool for a bunch of reasons:
Well, prospective feature list. And of course I should note that there’s a chance this comes from a marketing manager who’s looking to write case studies. But still: cool.
I don’t know what it says about me that I spent a good part of Saturday morning obsessively trying to remember the name of a toy that I had twenty-five years ago. In my defense, I was only trying to get the second movement of Bolcom’s 8th out of my head.
The toy I was trying to recall was a construction set. The main parts were a polygonal hub to which one connected struts to build the structure. After a good amount of aimless Google searches (though building toys 80s rods does turn up some funny things), the name swum into my head, unbidden. Ramagon.
The best image I found of the Ramagon toy was in an eBay listing. You can see the struts, in multiple lengths, in the front of the photo, with the soccer-ball-like hubs beside them. I had forgotten the snap-in panels, which were in different shapes to adopt to the different angles that could be formed from the intersection of hubs and spokes. And this was one of the cooler bits about the toy: while you could build right angles with it, its native symmetry was triangular and pyramidal. The symmetry came from the hubs, which are octagonal in cross section. The hubs could accept eight spokes in the same plane around their equator, eight more above or below the equatorial plane, coming off at about 45 degree angle, and one more at each pole. The spokes snapped in and out easily, as their tips were composed of two prongs that could be compressed together to fit into the holes in the hubs, and compressed again to come out.
The spokes were the weak link in the set; while the rest of the construction was solid, the plastic was just on the brittle side of strong and those prongs were prone to snapping off. (You’ll notice in the eBay image that a few prongs, disconnected from their struts, are included). But the set as a whole was very cool. You could build stuff with it that simply outclassed anything that you could do with either Lego (of the time, with its strongly rectilinear bias) or Erector. In fact, I remember hearing from one of my Dad’s NASA colleagues that the set strongly resembled something that was to become the foundation for the Space Station frame, and that NASA used the Ramagon sets to model future structures (this mention of the toy in a Kennedy Space Center kid’s book is kind of suggestive).
So what happened to Ramagon, and why isn’t it remembered in the same breath as Lego? One issue, perhaps was the purity of the hub and spoke model. You’ll notice in the eBay picture that the hubs had to do a lot of extra duty as engines, gun barrel mouths, and even wheels (with special rubber wraparound “tires” applied). There was no real room for the custom pieces that allowed Lego builders to extend beyond the basic brick.
And the company building the toy had its own issues. The founder, Richard Gabriel, took the concept from licensee to licensee but was apparently never able to get enough going to build market momentum.
I’ve been fighting it, but now it seems the cold, or rather miscellaneous bug of the week, is upon me. Too bad, too, because it’s a nice day and I can see the future of my iPhone getting much brighter.
There is an article to be written about the effectiveness of Apple’s product management—introducing the iPhone as a purely consumer device, then creating a massive developer ecosystem in a single announcement yesterday—but I kind of like Fake Steve Jobs’s take on the announcements even better.
I came into Gizmodo’s liveblog of the iPhone SDK announcement a little late, but the good stuff has already started, beginning with the announcement of native Exchange support for the iPhone. If I just worked in a Mac world I wouldn’d care so much about this, but with one too many IT administrators who don’t care to open up MAPI on their Exchange servers—plus the need to get access to calendars and address books—I’m thrilled that this is coming.
The internals of the SDK are really interesting, too. Of course the hacker community has known about this stuff for a long time, but seeing the full list of what is supported on the phone—certificates, Bonjour (aka ZeroConf networking), the Keychain, SQLite, the address book, threading support, location management, audio mixing and recording, video playback, 2D Quartz, plus a touch-optimized version of Cocoa.
And the development tools stack looks great too, including a true iPhone Simulator. Question: What about test automation? It’s been a long time since I looked at Xcode; does it include a test automation framework?
And I would never have expected a heavy emphasis on games on the first demo of the SDK, but all of a sudden it makes sense. The iPhone is not just a Windows Mobile killer, it could also be a PSP killer.
Now. What I’m waiting for is guidance for IT administrators so I can go have a conversation with my IT guy. And, of course, for the first iPhone apps to show up.
Update: SalesForce.com client!
I’ve turned in my score and come back to work from Carnegie Hall, but I still can’t get Bolcom’s 8th out of my mind. Then the perilous path was planted/And a river and a stream/from every cliff and tomb/till on the bleached bones/red clay brought forth, indeed. My bleached bones are a little sore from too little sleep and the train ride, but I remain under the spell of the piece.
There was no review in the New York Times this morning—one hopes one will be forthcoming—but a pair of reviews in other sources give a pretty good impression of the concert. ConcertoNet gave a positive review, pointing out the strong role of the women of the TFC in the work (“At other times, as in The Shadowy Daughter of Urthona, the rarified women’s group (as well as a lovely solo by Lorenzee Cole) illustrated this feminine poem”). And on a blog called Leonard Link, New York Law professor Arthur S. Leonard specifically called out the “excellence of the chorus” while declining to give a detailed impression of the piece since he and other listeners in the balcony did not receive text booklets. It’s unfortunate, as I thought our diction last night was particularly clear; I guess the hall swallowed the consonants.
For the benefit of Mr. Leonard and the other balcony listeners, the texts, as well as the full unexcerpted program notes, are available in PDF on the BSO web site.
I’m on the Acela this morning, heading back to New York for my second ever concert at Carnegie Hall with the BSO. This time feels more like a real performance; last fall when we sang Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, the chorus part was more atmosphere than anything else. We didn’t even have words to memorize, just vowel sounds.
Well, we have words this time. Thanks to Mr William Blake, whose prophetic vision has been stuck in my head for weeks now. I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go! Thou art the image of true God that dwells in darkness of Africa…
The cold that has been sneaking up on me for the past few days is almost here. I hope it holds out for a few more hours. There’s this weird thing that happens to my singing voice right before a cold settles in, when all the awful stuff in the back of my throat hits my vocal cords just right and smooths everything out and I’m hitting notes that were trouble the day before and will be unreachable for a week afterwards. With a little luck this is that kind of cold. I can hope, right?