inquiline weblog

Monday, February 19, 2007

Trying out an album

Here's some shots of me, old and new.

Too much good to post

Time to check in again. There's just been too much exciting stuff going on to even try and keep on top of it all.

It's winter in Seattle, and while that means gray days and rain in the lowlands near Puget Sound, it means snow in the Cascade mountains. After trips to Whistler Blackcomb at Web Directions North, Stevens Pass, Gold Creek at Snoqualmie and Crystal Mountain resorts - it's just been a whirlwind of winter wonderland. I'm in a constant state of slow recovery from one sore joint or another, but it's totally worth it.

Web Directions was a great experience this year. I made a boatload of new friends and I really hope to meet and toast our collective nerdy-ness again in the future. So many exciting presentations and events were had there. It really was a top-notch conference. Kudos to the hosts (that I got to meet), John Allsopp, Derek Featherstone, and everyone else that helped make it such a seamless operation. I'll continue following what's going on with all the great speakers that were there on my feed aggregator at Google Reader. I call it my web-directions-north feed, and you're welcome to peruse the content yourself.

Web Directions North 07

I think it's about time that I get over to my corporate blogging duties and make an inaugural post or two...

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Pardon the dust on my boots

I'm heavy into trying to get this blog-ish mess redesigned and in the style of the template I'm using on my googlepages presence. Give me another week and I'll have some thing presentable.

Well, maybe.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Innovation Extermination

Top ten tips for preventing innovation -Tyner Blain

1. Hire employees looking for safety in their roles. Innovation happens when people stretch outside their comfort zones - don'?t let them stretch! Find people who primarily want security and a nine-to-five role, stay away from those troublemakers who want to "change the world."?
2. Hire incompetent employees. What better way to prevent innovation than to have people who have to focus just to do the bare minimum? For extra safety, try and find someone who can take credit for other people'?s work and hide their own incompetence - these people are easier to promote, which will become important later. If we are forced to hire someone who is competent, it's critical that we make sure that they only have one area of expertise. People with more than one area of expertise, switch-hitters, just cause trouble by talking to people on other teams."

This goes on and on just getting better as it goes. I love reading stuff like this - it forces you out of your comfort zone of "reading any old blog post" and makes you challenge everything. In the end you're really paying attention, and that's just priceless.

Most businesses do a great job of rooting out and squashing innovation. It's rarely conscious, and all to often a consequence of conflicting agendas, a general deficit in trust, and negligent management practices.

If you have the opportunity and the foresight, I highly recommend asking a potential employer about some of these qualities before you accept a job. It can make a world of difference.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Code like a what?

Creating Passionate Users: Code like a girl:

"I think 'girl code' is quite a compliment. Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren't just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier--and more joyful--to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that's stressful to look at. And whether we like it or not, most of the world associates an appreciation for beauty more with women than men (especially geek men). Women may have a genetic advantage here."

There's a good point stuck here in this mashup of quotes and references. I've always been a fan of readable code - it sure makes for less comments and documentation when you have a coding style that enables quick re-learning of something you'd worked on months ago.

I won't go as far as to say the most important thing is writing code that makes other coders drool for the sake of the slobber. The documents I've seen which fell into that category certainly did have pretty code, but it wasn't about formatting or naming. It was all about an elegant solution to a problem. It was about brevity and wit in programming. I guess you could call it beauty if you were of that frame of mind, but I don't think the two are connected in many minds.

That being said, I would wear a code like a girl t-shirt. Mostly because I think girls are cool, and that there's not that many of them coding out there. Or rather, not enough of them coding out there.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

what's a craftsman?

Def. "skilled labor applied towards practical ends"

More importantly...

What's a craftsman doing with a WYSIWYG editor?

Shortly, it's about constraints. If you increase the set of rules governing what you can do in an environment, it forces you to be creative to accomplish anything. It's a certain kind of challenge that can be refreshing to creative minds.

I take a cue from music, first of all. Consider the system of pitches found on a piano. It's known as the 12-tone system, and is based on 12 semi-tone notes between octaves. An octave is basically the first and last notes in the simple scales that children sing in with the phrases, "do - re - mi ... la - ti - do". Assuming you're with me, you may also know that the 12 tone system is used in virtually all music in the known world with only a handful of exceptions. It's responsible for an almost infinite variety of types and genres and has provided a solid structure for mankind's musical aspirations for centuries.

Once science had caught up with our musical ears, and around the time that some people in western culture started discovering psychoactive substances, a new movement took hold. "Why only 12 steps between octaves, we know the frequencies, we have the tools (e.g. synthesizers), we can do it better!" Enter a short-lived stint of modern music. Composers like John Cage and others decided to blow the doors off the restrictive 12 tone system and go explore uncharted waters. They composed in 13 - 2000 tone systems, and tried to write the rules along side the music.

If you've never heard anything in this style of composing, you're not missing much. It sounds awful. It's without direction, or sense, or emotion, or resolution. Take my word for it, at its best, it's barely listenable. This comes from someone who studied music, and who loves most everything in music for one reason or another. Modernist music is a serious challenge to even begin to appreciate.

Leaving aside all the highly geeky science which attempted to link brain patterns and human-animal hardwiring to the reason we gravitated to the 12 tone system in the first place, I choose to focus here on a simpler reason why music in 12 tones is better than music in 365. The reason is constraints.

If you've ever come as far as trying to write music, you'll find only some things work, and those things are worked a lot. Only certain combinations of music sound happy or sad. There are a small number of chords that can take you out on the ledge and push you over, resolving that tension. These methods can be taught and learned, or rediscovered all on ones own, but in the end they represent a set of rules for how you hear and what it means. Some things work and others just don't.

Back to the web, please!

I write in a WYSIWYG editor because only some things work on the web. I choose to follow this convention that has been tested and documented, and proven time and time again. My purpose here is not to show you how far out there my design is, or that I don't accept your say-so that this is right or not. Frankly, I'm more interested in getting out some content, and "good enough" in the markup department is just that. If it looks good and works well, I'm happy.

Beyond that, there will be some things that I want to experiment with, and an editor like this can make you really have to understand the mechanics of a system to be able to stretch it beyond it's theoretical limit and see what's really possible. Coding in an environment like this gives me that ability by imposing those constraints. It forces me to put content first (a challenge for any nerd who're more comfortable hacking on someone else's prose than their own), and it limits the range of possibility down from 1,000,000 different design directions and possibilities, to maybe just the first 1,000 or so.

I don't need a full LAMP architecture and a XUL parser for the limited audience I'm trying to reach. As long as I can still convince them that I could install and operate XSL Transformations for their uber-geek Web2.0 enhanced application, than every thing will be just fine.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

got model

Couple reading/discussion items...

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/the_freemium_bu.html
I think I like this model better than the "all or nothing" model - it seems more attainable. But certainly it isn't a cash-cow.

Like these guys:
http://www.touchstonegadget.com/

It seems like they have a great idea, and are just running with it - not sure if they're students or what. Maybe that would be an option: a return to student-dom. I've always fancied a lifetime of education, and there's definately financing options for that plan.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

The Search: what ready access to everything always means

I read Boing Boing, an online magazine-turned-blog, for updates on current net-topics. It's got great editors and a huge contributor base. Today's columns had a quote that really struck me. In a post about Battelle's The Search: what ready access to everything always means, the reviewer, one Cory Doctorow, had a great reaction to the book:

"I had a search a-ha moment just last week. I went looking for an out-of-print cassette recording of a radio play. None of the used-goods dealers on Amazon had any copies listed, but Amazon knew that there were several who likely had copies, and it sent them bids on my behalf. I ended up with a copy of the tapes within a couple days, for less than the original retail price. Now I'm considering giving away the 15,000 books I put in storage because I thought that if I ever wanted to read them later, I'd never find them on the used-book market. The bottom has fallen out of the search-costs for used books and buying a title I'm looking for is likely to be cheaper than paying to keep it on the shelf in London."

While it's partly a dime store epiphany, it also struck me with it's new sense of value. I'm a self proclaimed major collector and "memorabilia packrat". Is this really where things are going? I need to think on this. Frankly, those 15,000 books have to live somewhere other than a landfill. Where do you then 'dump' your stuff so that it will be saved by someone until you decide you want to find it again? Does this extend beyond media items? What about that t-shirt from my 1988 IMEA All-state concert band? There's no way that some one will keep that for 20 years and then try to sell it on eBay, is there?