January 23, 2008 at 9:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
There are a number of recurring tropes and themes in my social network: individualism, collegiality, open-minded research, appreciation of autonomy, geekiness. Plus a few others.
For maybe nine months a number of us have been microcoworking at Primo Coffee in Ann Arbor every Wednesday, and meeting Fridays as time permits in the lounge at Pure Visibility. Microcoworking (or µcoworking) is not Coworking in the traditional sense of cubicles and sensible desk space and a mail drop, the way the people on the Coasts and Europe would have it. We all sit and work in cafés anyway; now we sit every Wednesday and work together in the same café. That’s all there is to it.
That and much more, of course. Because sitting together, we are one step closer than a mere Twitter network, an iChat. We’re in the same room, at the same table, and when I see something I can tell my friends about it immediately; when somebody wants an opinion they can ask it immediately; when one of us has an Andy Hardy moment and says, “I know guys! Let’s start a company!” we do it. Right there.
It works well. It’s low-impact social networking; no business cards required, no elevator speeches, no push to expand into The Next Google, no striving for VC. We’ve escaped all that crap.
You can have our share. Really. No, please, go right ahead.
We were just going to throw it away.
For a few weeks now we’ve been starting “Working Group” meetings as well. Maybe we don’t know what it’s for, and maybe we do, but innumerable µcoworking conversations on the theme of “We ought to do something with that idea,” have led to a group of the same folks, plus some extras, who just want to make some stuff together. We all have these projects: I want to put books online; Dan wants to show people how their stuff came to be; Bob wants to make Zigbee work for us (robots!); Laura wants to do laser graffiti. And so forth.
We have all these conversations, and we all end them by saying, “But I can’t do that by myself. Someday, when I have time.”
This when we’re all sitting on our collective asses surfing in a café, mind you. “When I have time” is code for “not by myself”, at least in many cases.
We met once last year, and once so far this year, and now the regular sessions begin for real. We’re working out the details of how things get done as we proceed.
But as a meta-design spike, four of us have already started experimenting. We’re doing a simple genetic programming project together. I get to polish my GP class notes (I teach a class now and then, and want to start one up here in town in the coming months); some of the other folks get to explore the potential and enhance their grasp of the Way Things Will Work; and we all get to try some kind of weird Agile Research thing out. We’re trying to do XP (1.0) as much as possible; we’re slipping a bit on Whole Team, and some of us are learning Python on the fly, and I confess we put the cart before the horse a bit by spiking before we completely wrote out story cards… but I think we’re doing what we can to comply with standard XP as she is spoke.
Now X”P” as a research methodology is an interesting prospect, frankly. There are some unanswered questions about direction and exploration vs. exploitation I’m itching to address… but we need to practice a bit first.
So what we’re doing is this: we’re re-implementing the Push3 language in pure Python. Push is Lee Spector’s almost-unreadable substrate for strongly-typed genetic programming with recursion and iteration. It’s a neat academic-flavored language that makes sense if you squint at it.
Until you learn a bit about actually doing GP. And then it becomes a tool you should absolutely have in your armamentarium. Because Push is a language (or design pattern, or dessert topping) that gives you a lot of structure in evolved programs (automatically generated algorithms) that traditional S-expression based genetic programming
fails to offer.
So Bob and Brian and JP and I are sitting down periodically and re-writing Maarten Keijzer’s description of Push3 in python, so we can (1) expand the language to solve some interesting not-at-all-academic problems by evolving novel intellectual property, (2) set up a unit tested, readable, expandable, distributed version of the infrastructure, and (3, once again) establish a kind of baseline rapport and methodology for doing pure research projects in an “agile” way.
(4) without touching C++ with a ten-foot pole. Sorry, Maarten. Ick. Does not want.
Now Push3 is a sprawling epic of a language. Full of counterintuitive stuff that makes you squint and cock your head and scratch your beard and that kind of thing. So we’re creating a subset of the language: one with no recursion, no iteration, no variable assignment. Those are all things that are “simple” in Push anyway: they’re just additional operators in the standard Push interpreter, and they don’t even do much that’s different from the base stuff.
And that minimal language, which we’ll use to fit some simple arithmetic functions and a wee bit of logical function-mining, will be called Nudge.
Watch for more on Nudge as it develops. Maybe, if I’m very diligent, I can manage to scrape together a bit of a copy of Ron and Chet’s accounts of their pair-programming essays. Maybe we can even draw them in with us. We’ll see in a bit.
And thus tonight I am reminded of something from long ago, that has somehow fallen off the Googleweb. The future. By way of the past. Push is 2004 tech. And yet it sits there, unremarked.
Look upon it, and fathom the unfathomable dynamics of your life, ten years on.
January 23, 2008 at 9:01 am · Filed under Uncategorized
For some reason this morning I woke up needing to (1) write a retrospective account of our progress on a small project I’m doing with Bob Kuehne, Brian Kerr and JP Sweeney (more on that later), (2) spell out some plans for the coming months, especially a road trip I need to make to Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Boston, NYC and all those little county-sized states up there in the right (more on that later), but also present (0) a word on Santa Claus.
How many people understand the line, “…wherefore art thou Romeo?” I’d imagine the vast majority of people think the girl’s asking, in essence, “Where the hell are you, you absent fellow named Romeo?”
Of course all of us here know she is asking something else entirely. That’s just good English, that is. Oldy style, but perfectly good.
And now for today’s pre-caffeinated dream-remnant? I propose an equal number of Americans misunderstand Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit From Saint Nicholas”, and in particular the line “And laying a finger aside of his nose, and giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.”
I personally have used the finger-aside-nose gesture for a long time—in the traditional meaning—and I have suddenly realized that very few people who see me do it have any idea what I mean. Which is dumbfounding. And also I see that most folks presented with the Jolly Old Elf prodding his proboscis must consider it some kind of causative, mystical pass of some sort. I think I’ve seen it done that way in some animated version, for example: like Barbara Eden crossing her arms and blinking, or Elizabeth Montgomery twitching her nose. Their mental model of Santa is one where he has a secret levitation device in his sinus, or something?
And that was all. Just trying to get the zeroth item off my To Do list today.
January 19, 2008 at 9:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized
[cont'd]
When you are searching the Internet (”Googling”) for your own or your organization’s name, and you come across a negative opinion expressed about either, do not step into the conversation unless you really understand the social and cultural norms of the community in which the comments were expressed.
If you find that somebody has mentioned an organization you founded on their personal blog, and it seems as if they didn’t like their entire experience of your organization, that should be seen as an opportunity to succeed in future. It is not an attack.
If you find that somebody has mentioned an organization you founded, and a commenter to the blog post has expressed a strongly negative opinion or reported a negative experience, do not impugn the owner of the blog for allowing the comments to remain.
When your comments on a blog are placed automatically in moderation, do not re-post the same or a more strident comment immediately after.
When your comments on a blog are in moderation, do not look up the cell phone number of the blog owner and call them directly.
When you are calling anybody in the United States to discuss blogs or your organization, do not call at 8am on a Saturday morning.
When you are calling a cell phone in the United States from overseas, do not keep talking for five minutes after they tell you it’s too early, or that they’re busy, or that they don’t want to talk to you on the phone right now, or that they don’t want to talk to you at all. Be polite, be brief. Do not just keep talking. Many cell phone owners in the United States have to pay. Further, do not say, “Oh, you have to pay?! In my country, only the caller has to pay. I was unfamiliar with this system! Do you think….” and so on for a very long time.
When you are speaking via telephone with somebody who has expressed a negative opinion of your organization on their personal blog, do not offer to send free books or magazines or stuff like that to them. If you want to promote your organization, do so by promoting the organization. If you want to interact with the electronic community, act electronically. Do not cross boundaries of media unless you know those boundaries should be crossed.
In particular, when you are speaking with somebody who has expressed an explicit negative opinion of the Academy in general, or of the Military-Academic Publishing Complex, or who is known in his social circles for constantly pointing out the undeserved social and cultural privilege of the scholar class, do not pointedly ask if he is a student, or has a Ph.D., or if not that then what? Is he just a consultant now?
Finally. If you are tempted to repeat any of these actions after having been advised not to by your correspondent, do not expect the privilege of a calm, thoughtful response.
People can get bored with that sort of thing very quickly.
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