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• 

  Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

  Posted: March 24th, 2010, 8:44pm MDT

  Enclosure: [download]

  Since I know some of you are MBTI fans: check out my friend Nolan's simplified Myers-Briggs personality test for Android. Use your phone to test people you meet at parties. :)
• 

  Photos: Scratch

  Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

  

  Playing with a "game" we designed in Scratch.

• 

  Photos: Office

  Posted: March 24th, 2010, 4:02pm MDT

  

  My home office, after getting it all set up this weekend.

• 

  Asides: Jumping into Mercurial after 3 years of heavy Git usage. Now I know how my ex-colleagues felt learning Git while accustomed to Subversion.

  Posted: March 24th, 2010, 2:18pm MDT

  Jumping into Mercurial after 3 years of heavy Git usage. Now I know how my ex-colleagues felt learning Git while accustomed to Subversion.
• 

  Journal: Daylight Saving Time

  Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:44pm MDT

  Eleanor (after bed time): Why is the sky not dark? Me: Now that it's spring, the days are longer. The sun is just starting to set. Eleanor (cheerfully): Daddy, can't sleep when the sky's not dark!

  Sigh...

• 

  Asides: Mozilla says goodbye to Firefox for Windows Mobile. Hello, Android and Maemo/MeeGo! http://bit.ly/bJ3QUP

  Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 11:00pm MDT

  Mozilla says goodbye to Firefox for Windows Mobile. Hello, Android and Maemo/MeeGo! http://bit.ly/bJ3QUP
• 

  Bookmarks: Health Insurance | Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner

  Posted: March 21st, 2010, 7:21pm MDT

  Includes a list of rates and providers of individual health plans by WA county.
• 

  Bookmarks: Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis

  Posted: March 19th, 2010, 9:22am MDT

  "A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni... An alumni relationship is positive; something that people can take pride in; and one that keeps the door open for further opportunities on both ends."
• 

  Asides: It's nice how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid can wake from sleep and connect to wifi in 5 seconds on my ThinkPad (at least twice as fast as Karmic).

  Posted: March 17th, 2010, 8:17am MDT

  It's nice how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid can wake from sleep and connect to wifi in 5 seconds on my ThinkPad (at least twice as fast as Karmic).
• 

  Journal: Freelance tips?

  Posted: March 17th, 2010, 5:15am MDT

  I'm starting my new job at Mozilla as a contractor. The last time I was an independent contractor was eight years ago, in Canada. I've got some decent advice from web sites like FreelanceSwitch and Seattle's Poplar, but I'd like to know if anyone here has consulting experience and can answer some questions:

  1. How do you track time and expenses, and send invoices? What do you consider billable vs. non-billable?
  2. I know health insurance is important, but do you have dental insurance or any other personal insurance?
  3. Do you have a separate bank account for your contracting business?
  4. Fellow Washingtonians, what business licenses and taxes do you file, aside from federal income and self-employment tax?
  5. Do you have a lawyer or accountant? If so, can you recommend one in the Seattle area?
  6. Anything else I might not have thought of?
• 

  Bookmarks: Android: On Context Buttons

  Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:37pm MDT

  "So, while the first three of these buttons are indeed useful (and I do honest to goodness use them all the time), I would argue that they shouldn’t exist."
• 

  Bookmarks: Confessions of a home-schooler - Salon.com

  Posted: March 16th, 2010, 4:28pm MDT

  "For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it's like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert." (via tvancort)
• 

  Asides: @koush Walk into a bar and ask to handle someone's Tattoo or Liquid. Then you'll get to test your recovery.

  Posted: March 13th, 2010, 3:40pm MST

  @koush Walk into a bar and ask to handle someone's Tattoo or Liquid. Then you'll get to test your recovery.
• 

  Weblog: Discovering Urbit: Functional programming from scratch

  Posted: March 12th, 2010, 1:00am MST

  C. Guy Yarvin is a “good friend” of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger known for iconoclastic novella-length essays on politics and history (and occasionally computer science). Guy recently published, under his own name, a project in language and systems design. His own writing about his work is entertaining but verbose (as Moldbug's readers might expect), so I will attempt to summarize it here.

  Nock, Urbit, Watt

  First there is Nock, “a tool for defining higher-level languages – comparable to the lambda calculus, but meant as foundational system software rather than foundational meta­mathe­matics.” Its primitives include positive integers with equality and increment operators, cons cells with car/cdr/cadr/etc., and a macro for convenient branching. Nock uses trees of integers to represent both code and data. Nock is aggressively tiny; the spec linked above is just 33 terse lines.

  Next, Guy provides the rationale for Nock. In short, he asks how a planet-wide computing infrastructure (OS, networking, and languages) would look if designed from first priniciples for robustness and interoperability. The answer he proposes is Urbit: a URI-like name­space distributed globally via content-centric networking, with a feudal structure for top-level names and cryptographic identities. Urbit is a static functional name­space: it is both referentially transparent and monotonic (a name, once bound to a value, cannot be un- or re-bound).

  Why does this require a new formal logic and a new programming language? In Urbit, all data and code are distributed via the global namespace. For interoperability, the code must have a standard format. Nock's minimal spec is meant to be an un­ambiguous, unchanging, totally standardized basis for computation in Urbit. Above it will be Watt, a self-hosting language that compiles to Nock. Urbit itself will be implemented in Watt, so Nock and Watt are designed to treat data as code using metacircular evaluation.

  The code

  A prototype implementation of Watt is on GitHub. It is not yet self-hosting; the current compiler is written in C. Watt is a functional language with static types called “molds” and a mechanism for explicit lazy evaluation. (I was suprised to find I had accidentally created an in­com­patible lazy dialect of Nock – despite its goal of unambiguous semantics – just by implementing it in Haskell.)

  The code is not fully documented, but the repository contains draft specs for both Watt and Urbit. Beware: the syntax and terminology are a bit unconventional. Guy has offered a few exercises to help get started with Nock and Watt:

  The Nock challenge: Write a decrement operator in Nock, and an interpreter that can evaluate it. Basic Watt: Write an integer square root function in Watt. Advanced Watt: How would you write a function that tests whether molds A and B are orthogonal (no noun is in both A and B)? Or compatible (any noun in A is also in B)? Are these functions NP-complete? If so, how might one work around this in practice?

  If you want to learn more, start with these problems. You can email your solutions to Guy.

  Will it work?

  I find Urbit intellectually appealing; it is a simple and clean architecture that could potentially replace a lot of complex system software. But can we get there from here?

  Guy imagines Urbit as the product of an ages-old Martian civilization:

  Since Earth code is fifty years old, and Martian code is fifty million years old, Martian code has been evolving into a big ball of mud for a million times longer than Earth software. (And two million times longer than Windows.) …

  Therefore, at some point in Martian history, some abject fsck of a Martian code-monkey must have said: fsck this entire fscking ball of mud. For lo, its defects cannot be summarized; for they exceed the global supply of bullet points; for numerous as the fishes in the sea, like the fishes in the sea they fsck, making more little fscking fishes. For lo, it is fscked, and a big ball of mud. And there is only one thing to do with it: obliterate the trunk, fire the developers, and hire a whole new fscking army of Martian code-monkeys to rewrite the entire fscking thing.

  … This is the crucial inference we can draw about Mars: since the Martians had 50 million years to try, in the end they must have succeeded. The result: Martian code, as we know it today. Not enormous and horrible – tiny and diamond-perfect. Moreover, because it is tiny and diamond-perfect, it is perfectly stable and never changes or decays. It neither is a big ball of mud, nor tends to become one. It has achieved its final, permanent and excellent state.

  Do Earthlings have the will to throw out the whole ball of mud and start from scratch? I doubt it. We can build Urbit but no one will come, unless it solves some problem radically better than current software. Moldbug thinks feudalism will produce better online reputation, but feudal reputation does not require feudal identity; it is not that much harder to build Moldbug's reputation system on Earth than on Mars. I still have not figured out the killer app that will get early adopters to switch to Urbit.

• 

  Bookmarks: Official Google Blog: Biking directions added to Google Maps

  Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:26am MST

  Google Maps adds bike maps and bike routes, thanks to Seattle-based Googlers. It knows to avoid hills and prefer bike trails and bike lanes.
• 

  Buzz: Buzz by Matt Brubeck from Buzz

  Posted: March 6th, 2010, 4:25pm MST

  Enclosure: [download]

  But "Ender Wiggins" doesn't have the same initials...
• 

  Bookmarks: The School Issue - Preschool - Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? - NYTimes.com

  Posted: March 6th, 2010, 9:22am MST

  "If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea." Profile of a school using the Tools of the Mind method.
• 

  Journal: Mozilla

  Posted: March 4th, 2010, 11:57am MST

  

  Later this month I am starting a new job with the Mobile Firefox team at the Mozilla Corporation. I'll be staying in Seattle, with occasional trips to the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. I'll work mostly at home but I plan to come downtown about once a week to work at the library, coffee shops, StartPad, or friends' offices. Let me know if you are in Seattle or the Bay Area and want to get together sometime. After I start working from home I should be eager for company.

  Kiha is still doing good things and I'll be watching their progress eagerly. I learned a lot there and I like the direction Kiha is taking, but Mozilla's offer was too good to pass up: working on free software, open standards, new platforms, and with many hackers whose work I know and admire.

  Trivia: I've now had more non-student jobs in eight years than my dad has in thirty-eight.

• 

  Asides: How did I miss @dkpan's 24-hour Haruki Murakami reading last summer, one block from my office? http://occidentalpark.wordpress.com/events/

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:41pm MST

  How did I miss @dkpan's 24-hour Haruki Murakami reading last summer, one block from my office? http://occidentalpark.wordpress.com/events/
• 

  Asides: Found the banknotes' owner, @dkpan. Due to his name's shortness, it was unabridged on the library's hold slip. We got in touch on Facebook.

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:32pm MST

  Found the banknotes' owner, @dkpan. Due to his name's shortness, it was unabridged on the library's hold slip. We got in touch on Facebook.
• 

  Asides: Tonight I found one Soviet- and one Iranian banknote in my library book ("Girl with Curious Hair").

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:13pm MST

  Tonight I found one Soviet- and one Iranian banknote in my library book ("Girl with Curious Hair").
• 

  Asides: @mhewner Ringdroid was written Audacity author Dominic Mazzoni, who first introduced me to Josh Haberman (and thus indirectly to you)!

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 12:12pm MST

  @mhewner Ringdroid was written Audacity author Dominic Mazzoni, who first introduced me to Josh Haberman (and thus indirectly to you)!
• 

  Bookmarks: Correct way to handle mobile browsers

  Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:27pm MST

  Redirect mobile users to the mobile site automatically, or require them to choose explicitly? Pro and con.
• 

  Weblog: The network is the human being

  Posted: March 1st, 2010, 1:00am MST

  Nathanael Boehm wrote a nice essay last month called The Future of Employment?, about a disconnect between workers' and employers' views of social networks. (This post is based partly on the ensuing Hacker News thread.) Boehm wrote:

  When I need help with a challenge at work or need to run some ideas past people I don’t turn to my co-workers, I look to my network of colleagues beyond the walls of my workplace. Whilst my co-workers might be competent at their job they can’t hope to compete with the hundreds of people I have access to through my social networks.

  The late Sun Microsystems taught us that the network is the computer. It's true: we still use non-networked computers for specialized tasks, but nobody wants one on their desk – it's just so useless compared to one that talks to the entire world. Boehm could have titled his essay The Network is the Employee. There are still tasks that people do in isolation, but the ability to contact a network of peers and experts makes the difference in my job, and many others.

  Alone together

  The lone computer programmer in a small business has thousands of colleagues on Stack Overflow, Reddit, and so on. It's a messy way to find answers, but it's sure better than the days when your only choice was to call tech support – or smack the box with your fist, whichever seemed more useful. I can't begin to list all the problems I've solved and things I've learned by Googling for others with experience, and getting help from a different expert for every problem.

  Decades before the web, computer geeks had virtual communities on mailing lists, Usenet, and IRC. Now every job in the world has its corresponding forum. Even the night clerk at the gas station has Not Always Right.

  Teaching has long been a solitary profession. Despite working in a crowded classroom, teachers are isolated; they rarely have colleagues observing or participating directly in their work. This has such an impact that teachers are sometimes trained in meditation or reflection techniques, to make up for the lack of external feedback. So I'm curious what happens when teachers start to work together remotely the way programmers do.

  You will be assimilated

  Boehm's essay also reminded me of a vague sci-fi idea I've been kicking around: the first group minds will evolve from the intersection of Mechanical Turk, virtual assistants, social networking, and augmented reality.

  Starting around the 1990s, it was possible to instantly "know" any fact that was published online. Since then, we've increased the amount of content online, our tools for searching it, and ways of connecting to the network. Today we have instant access to almost any published knowledge, anywhere.

  There are more people on the net too, and more ways to find and talk to them. Most of us can contact dozens of friends at any given moment, plus friends-of-friends, co-workers, fellow members of communites like Hacker News or MetaFilter, and also complete strangers. Along with raw facts, we have access to vast amounts of human judgement, experience, and skill.

  One product of this is the "virtual assistant," who provides a service that was once exclusive to high-powered executives. Now personal assistants can work remotely (often overseas), spread costs by serving many masters, and leverage the internet superpowers listed above. Their services are mostly targeted at small business owners and the Tim Ferriss crowd, but I'm sure someone soon will market virtual assistance to all sorts of other creative workers, teachers, even stay-at-home parents.

  So, how long before I can touch a button to let a remote assistant see what I'm seeing in real-time and help me make transportation plans, translate foreign signs and speech, look up emails related to whatever I'm doing or thinking, or even advise me on what to say? Some of these queries will go to my circle of friends, others to the general public, and some to a personal assistant who is paid well to keep up with my specific needs. And that assistant of course will subcontract portions of each job to computer programs, legions of cheap anonymous Turkers, or his or her own network of helpers. At that point, I'm augmenting my own perception, memory, and judgement with a whole network of brains that I carry around, ready to engage with any situation I meet.

  If nothing else, I hope someone writes a good sci-fi thriller story in which a rogue virtual assistant manipulates the actions of unsuspecting clients, leading them to some unseen end.