M83: Teen Angst

Labels: Music

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. . .if your iteration planning meetings start to look like a spirited game of Numberwang.

Labels: Business, Programming

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Yariv makes a good point about ets being Erlang’s sort of equivalent to shared memory. I agree totally.

What I like about Erlang is that ets, and hence shared memory, is totally optional. You can use ets when it’s suitable and ignore it otherwise. It gives you, the programmer, more control over the complexity of your code. The more I use Erlang the more I see the concepts of lightweight processes and message-passing simplifying and improving my code.

Other languages, like most of the OOP-y ones, come with shared memory baked into their models. From the first line you’re stuck in threading hell and you don’t even know it.

Of course, the state of blissful ignorance ends all to soon. It’s been my experience threads will get introduced at some point either explicitly — to speed up obviously parallel operations — or implicitly — such as when code which was never designed with a web application’s request/response model is integrated into a web application.

Then you’re stuck battling all kinds of threading issues. Race conditions, lock contention, etc, etc. I’ve been there many, many times and have the scars to prove it.

I much prefer to work in a language which helps me design my code in such a way as to avoid these problems from the start. 90% of the time I can solve my design problems by using Erlang’s processes and message passing. If I need to introduce shared memory into my code I can selectively include it in only the areas which truly require it without poisoning the rest of the code.

Labels: Erlang

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I was having lunch the other day with Jared and we got onto the topic of tools writers use to abuse themselves into being productive.

I’ve mentioned Isolator before, which I use daily, but Jared mentioned Freedom which takes writer self-abuse to a whole new level.

The app essentially turns off all network interfaces for a given time period. No email. No browser. No RSS reader updates. No Twitter. Just you, your machine, and absolutely no excuses left. I love it!

Labels: Tech, Writing

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[I wrote this post yesterday (5/9/2008) but forgot to push the publish button until today.]

I’m finally able to talk about some of my Erlang-related busyness. The most exciting news is that I’ve accepted a position with Engine Yard. I’ll be using Erlang pretty much full-time on some automation and systems management projects — something I have some experience with from my days on the RHN product team.

To say I’m excited is an understatement. I get to use Erlang, I get to work for a company who seems to “get” open source, and I get to work from the comfort of my home office. Not to mention working with a really smart bunch of guys responsible for Merb, Rubinius, and a bunch of other interesting and generally cool software.

I’m still pinching myself.

And that’s not all. But it’s all the stuff I can talk about right now. More announcements coming soonish. . .

Labels: Erlang, Life

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As the saying goes, when it rains it pours. I’ve been so busy over the past few days I’ve hardly had time to even think about this blog, let alone write anything.

I can see the end to this busy period, though. Once that happens I’ll be blogging about the insanely cool stuff I’ve got going on. All I can say right now is that it’s Erlang related and I think its the bee’s knees.

Until then, your patience is appreciated.

Labels: Erlang

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Man w/Pet Hyena

Labels: Misc

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Current earworm: Again & Again by the bird and the bee

Such a fun song but almost too catchy. Get out of my head! Get out!

 

Labels: Media

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Damn, I hope The Register doesn’t have any epileptic readers.

See the ugliness here.

Labels: Media

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My home office could use several of these.

Labels: Misc

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This graph represents my earnings from 1994, the year I graduated from college, up to 2007. The black line represents earnings for each year in absolute dollars. The red line represents earnings for each year normalized to 1994 dollars. The red line is meant to reflect the trend of each year’s purchasing power.

I was inspired to create the graph based on Geoffrey Knauth’s Falling Incomes blog post. On the one hand, the downward turn of the purchasing power trend is troubling. On the other, see empirical evidence which confirms a hunch is satisfying.

Here’s hoping a change in administration will see the red line tick upwards. Given the number of problems the economy is facing, I’m not hopeful that will occur anytime soon.

Labels: Life

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I’ve been using iShowU on a side project for a few weeks. I’ve found it to be a simple well-designed tool for making high-quality screencasts. Just what the multimedia-challenged geek, aka me, needs.

I could go on for a bit on just how nice the software is but what I really want to talk about is how much shinywhitebox, the company behind iShowU, rocks. I’ve been bedeviled for several weeks with patchy audio problems when I captured a screencast. The problem was intermittent at best and didn’t appear in other audio recording apps such as Audacity or GarageBand. I’d tried everything I could think of and was totally stumped.

Out of desperation I posted to the product support forums on shinywhitebox’s website. I found several other users experiencing the same problems. It looked like something was amiss in iShowU. I tried a couple more workarounds suggested by other forum posters but to no avail.

After exchanging a few forum posts with Neil Clayton, one of the principals at shinywhitebox, I volunteered to be a guinea pig in the hopes of nailing down the cause of the problem. What followed was the best customer service experience I’ve ever had dealing with a software company.

Over the course of a 2 hour iChat session I ran several debug builds of the next major version of iShowU, poked through logs, and prodded various bits of OS X’s audio subsystem. By the end of the session Neil had determined the app wasn’t to blame for my audio problems AND had several suggestions on what could be causing the problem AND steps I could take to debug it further.

Neil was friendly and helpful during the entire duration of the chat. I was extremely impressed with his debugging skills and appreciated him going above and beyond to help me debug my problem so I could meet a deadline. It turns out my mic preamp was going bad but only during sustained use. Go figure.

Neil and shinywhitebox have definitely earned my business in the future. They perfectly illustrate why I love small ISVs so much. The level of passion, knowledge, and support in a good small software company simply cannot be beat by the larger companies.

If you ever need screencasting software, I highly recommend iShowU. It’s a great product backed by a great company.

Labels: Business, Tech

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Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Tiredness sucks.

Labels: Life

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Parenting has its fair share of surprising moments. Yes, yes, I know that most of the pablum-laced parenting publications routinely put forth such drivel as “parenting is the toughest, yet most rewarding blah blah blah” or “it’s the best of jobs and the worst of jobs blah blah blah”. Crikey, am I a parent in a Dickensian novel or what?

Every once in a while you can have a truly surprising moment. I had one of those today with my daughter during our routine drive to school. We were snarled in traffic when The Girl observed “wouldn’t it be cool if we had a flying car?”. We discussed the merits of flying cars vs. road-bound ones when The Girl asked “would there be police in the sky?”

I explained that while, no there were no cops in the sky, there was the FAA which made the rules airplane pilots had to follow. The Girl thought for a moment and pushed further. “But were there ever policemen who ride on planes?”, The Girl asked.

I explained that there were special policemen, called sky marshals, who sometimes ride planes. The sky marshals are there to keep passengers safe, I further explained. I could see the next question coming before the last few words were out of my mouth. “Safe from what?”, the Girl asked.

My brain shifted into overdrive. I calculated the ability of a 1st grader to understand the events on 9/11 and terrorism in general. I considered the implication of explaining terrorism and its effects to my daughter. I briefly cursed the world for being a nasty, violent, and messy place.

Then I punted. I used the spate of airline hijackings in the 70’s as the basis of my explanation. I told her that men from a country called Palestine had taken control of planes a long time ago and made them fly to places different from where the planes were supposed to go. I explained that the men were upset because the country they came from wasn’t treated well and they wanted everyone to know. The sky marshals were put on planes to make sure that didn’t happen again.

Again, I set up The Girl’s next question. “Why were people mean to their country?”, she asked. I told her that a bunch of people new to Palestine had moved there and taken over part of the land when her grandma was a little girl. “Why?”, came the reply.

Knowing that there was no way I was going to explain the Holocaust — she’s waaaay too young to handle that — I punted again and provided a greatly simplified version. I told her that the Germans didn’t like another group of people who were called the Jews. The Germans made all of the Jews leave so they didn’t have a place to live. After World War 2 the world — my short hand for the United Nations — decided to give the Jews a place to live. They gave them part of Palestine which made the Palestinians angry.

We pulled up to her school and parked the car which ended the conversation. A whirlwind tour of Middle Eastern events of the last 60 years cut down for a 1st grader. My mind still boggles.

Labels: Life

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I was listening to an interview with Jena McGregor, reporter with Businessweek, who wrote this year’s World’s Most Innovative Companies article.

Most of the usual suspects were present: Apple, Google, Nintendo, and Amazon. More surprising was the presence of Goldman-Sachs. What was their innovative concept which landed them on the list?

Not following the Wall St. herd in buying heaps of sub-prime debt.

Awesome.

Labels: Business

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