The Standard Output (zeitgeist)

Getting the attention of anti-social geeks

Jonas Gorauskas — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 07:17:57 GMT

I was reading Tim Bray's blog today and he mentions that at OSCON this year there was a company booth which was capturing the attention of anti-social geeks in a novel way.

... they had a big screen sticking up showing a continuous loop of a screen capture of someone setting an app up for OAuth, with lots of JSON and JS and other config stuff going back and forth across the screen. A lot of your antisocial geeks who don’t actually want to interact with anyone remotely salesy were standing there watching this with educated attention.

This is a really interesting trick and I can count myself in that group of anti-social geeks often. I saw another company doing this at the O'Reilly Velocity conference earlier this year.

Emacs Utility For Overloading The NSA Line Eater

Jonas Gorauskas — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 01:50:51 GMT

How about this for prescient tin foil hat geekery... While reading the Emacs Elisp source for version 24.3, I stumbled upon a little gem located at ./lisp/play/spook.el.

This file has a created date of May, 1987. Emacs has included this program for many years. Its purpose is to add a series of keywords to email just before sending it. On the theory that the NSA monitors people's email, the keywords would be picked up by NSA's snoop computers, causing them to waste time reading your meeting schedule notices or other email boring to everyone but you and the recipient.

You should try it: open Emacs and type M-x spook to see what happens.

From the commentary on the file itself:

Just before sending mail, do M-x spook. A number of phrases will be inserted into your buffer, to help give your message that extra bit of attractiveness for automated keyword scanners. Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!

Read on my Twitter Stream

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 20:34:36 GMT

Read this on my Twitter stream:

Wealth is our organised capability to cope effectively with the environment to sustain our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.

from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller

What are the genuinely useful ideas in programming?

Jonas Gorauskas — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 05:48:21 GMT

There is a really interesting article here about "What are the genuinely useful ideas in programming".

The comments are closed for that post, so here are the two things I would add to the list:

Index = Data(Algorithm + Data Structure): Google made this concept relevant, again.
Sensors, and networks of them (not to be confused with scanners (e.g. barcode, QR)): The Arduino and the Raspberry Pi made these important.

Three Rules for Project Selection

Jonas Gorauskas — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 06:14:47 GMT

Today I ran across a thought provoking article on Dr. Dobb's. The thesis is that there is a perception that Open Source projects copies what already exists and it's in Closed Source where the real innovation occurs. This perception exists in part because how geeks choose what to work on.

There is most definitely evidence to the contrary and also to support that perception, but the main point of the article is that there is a fundamental problem in Open Source which manifests itself as this perception. The problem is with project selection.

Now, Dijkstra wrote a memo in 1982 that describes 3 steps to use when selecting a topic for your research. These rules translate really well to hacking and all geeks should consider them when selecting an Open Source project to work on. The rules are:

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.
We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail.
Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you.

Let's break this down a little so it can be easily digested.

Rule 1 is an internal one and it tells us that the obviously possible should be shunned as well as the obviously impossible: the first would not be instructive, the second would be hopeless, and both in their own way are barren.

Next, Dijkstra was referring to scientific projects, but Rule 2 can be easily mapped to software projects also.

Rule 3 is the most important from an Open Source perspective. It ensures that your contributions are unique and move the-state-of-the-art forward. As Dijkstra so eloquently puts "If others will come up with as good a solution as you could obtain, the world doesn't loose a thing if you leave the problem alone. A corollary of the third rule is that one should never compete with one's colleagues. If you are pretty sure that in a certain area you will do a better job than anyone else, please do it in complete devotion, but when in doubt, abstain."

I will be applying this rules to my future project selection. I hope you do too.

Links for 2011-07-19

Jonas Gorauskas — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:40:50 GMT

Links for 2011-06-01

Jonas Gorauskas — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:44:16 GMT

Links for 2011-05-29

Jonas Gorauskas — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:54:09 GMT

Some links for 2011-05-20

Jonas Gorauskas — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:27:39 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2011-01-03

Jonas Gorauskas — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:00:48 GMT

New Year's Resolution - Lose 100 Lbs.

Jonas Gorauskas — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 04:55:31 GMT

About a year and a half ago, Tim Ferriss (of 4 Hour Work Week fame) was looking for subjects to test some of the theories in his newly published book The Four Hour Body. I immediately volunteered for the experiments, but never received a reply from Tim or his people. About a year later I remember receiving a thank you email explaining that the pool of candidates was overwhelming and that they would not pick me. They were really nice about it, but I was a little disappointed nonetheless.

Fast forward another year to 12/19/2010 or thereabouts and I receive a package in the mail from a book publisher. First thought I had was That's weird, I didn't order anything recently.... The actual contents of the package were 2 hardcover copies of The 4 Hour Body. I started reading it immediately and through the Holidays, and I had an epiphany: I can fix my weight problem the same way that I fix any other problem I have at work.

I have been fighting with my weight for years, ever since I stopped playing basketball competitively in college and my exercise regimen went down the gutter. Today I am a six foot eight inches man who weights in at 400 plus pounds (the scale at home tops off at 400). I graduated from college in 1997 and have been working in a sit down job in the technology industry ever since. I worked as a technical writer and then as a programmer for several startups during the Internet boom years and I put on the pounds during that time. Then in early 2003 I went to work for Microsoft and that was not much of a change in the health department. Then the kids were born in 2005 and I got even less exercise than before. But the funny thing is that I think of myself as a person who can figure out a solution for any problem, and yet I have not been able to crack the weight nut.

This is were Tim's book has inspired me. I will approach my weight problem the same way that I approach any technical problem at work:

Root cause analysis: With most technical problems, you need to first find out what and where the problem is, gather baseline data (if there is any), and then figure out how to fix it. In the case of my weight problem and general lack of well-being, the root cause is a poor diet and complete lack of exercise.
Baseline measurements: Based on Tim's advice, I am taking measurements of my body at several locations: belly, arms, legs, etc. I am also keeping track of weight. I am not tracking my BMI at this point because I don't have a good way to measure it. I wrote a quick Django app that allows me to quickly gather the data no matter where I am. All I need is a connection to the Internet. Later I can easily export the data to a spreadsheet for slicing and dicing and graphing.
How to fix it: I will be using Tim's slow-carb diet and an exercise regimen that includes weights and swimming. Body measurements will be taken weekly to compare to baseline and that way track progress. A food diary will also be used to track food intake and portion size and I will use a web-based photo gallery app for that.
The goal: The goal is to lose 100 Lbs. by 12/31/2011
Progress: I will be tracking my progress with the tools I described above and with periodical posts to this blog.

I shared my plan and ideas with my family over the Holidays and they were all very encouraging. But the obvious question was asked and I should address it here also: You have tried to lose weight before, what is different about this time? The key thing that is so obvious in hind-sight, but it never occurred to me until I started reading Tim's book is that I can break down and fix the weight problem in the same way that I tackle a programming or other technical problem. Break down the problem in its component parts, measure the parts of the problem consistently to track progress, tweak the approach to get optimal results... This is just like hacking on a programming project. I have years of experience doing this and I have had many more successes than failures doing it this way with code. I am certain that I can apply this approach to the weight problem and be successful.

I will keep you posted on the progress...

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-11-20

Jonas Gorauskas — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 21:31:00 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-11-13

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 23:11:58 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-11-06

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 20:16:19 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-10-30

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:00:00 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-10-23

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 19:00:00 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-10-16

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:00:00 GMT

[delicious | grep links | blogger] for 2010-10-09

Jonas Gorauskas — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:00:00 GMT

On networking and selling your brand as a geek

Jonas Gorauskas — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:50:00 GMT

My manager at work thinks that I do really good work. I think she tells me thetruth since this is reflected in my reviews and bonuses. But she also says thatgood work alone is not enough, and that I have to go sell myself and networkwith my peers to get more visibility to the important projects that I'm workingon. This visibility is important at the company where I work when review timerolls around.

There's nothing wrong with that (and I really mean it... I'm not mocking anyonehere or the process itself, despite the vague reference to Seinfeld). But thereis something about this process that always made me uncomfortable, and althoughI've always had a vague idea about what it was, I could never nail it down. Or,more likely, I never took the time to think it through and analyze it.

Reginald Braithwaite (of Raganwald fame and now working on homoiconic), a chap that I have followed for a few years now, has put it very succinctly and eloquently:

"... I have social anxiety, and while I am stimulated in an incredibly rich and rewarding way when I meet and talk to people I like and admire, when there are more than a few people in the room I feel incredibly uncomfortable and have to fight the urge to slide out.

The irony of using networking in my career when I'm deathly afraid of one ofthe most important methods of networking is not lost on me ..."

To which I respond: Yes! Me too! I could not have said it better myself.

Rastafarian Software

Jonas Gorauskas — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:30:00 GMT

This is an instant classic. Rasta Code:

while (love & passion) {
    for (fight = 0; rights < freedom; rights++) {
        fight = standup(rights);
    }
    free(babylon);
}

Check it out here: http://rastasoft.org/