Category Archives: essay

Essays

How to not hire a programmer

Here are some more snippets from pseudo-spam job offers. I’ll leave off the names to protect the incompetent.

We have a dedicated practice team which works on Web2.0 domain, open source technologies like AJAX, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Apollo and Silverlight.

Um, guys, AJAX is a marketing buzzword that refers to web-design practices, not any actual software. Neither Apollo nor Silverlight are open source. Perl and Ruby? Nothing about those languages are particularly Web 2.0. Good try, though, you managed to get seven buzzwords in one sentence.

Another email promised the opportunity to work on

a customized user interface using DOS and X-Windows on Linux

DOS on Linux. Sweet. Of course, I’m more of an PDP-11 on Mac OS X kinda guy.

And then there was this one:

Position: C++ Perl Unix Developer
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Cool! I’ll just drive my Car Bicycle Train to Sunnyvale every day and happily work there in my Office Cubicle, sitting at my Desk Couch, working on my Computer Refrigerator, on their C++ Perl Unix project.

A Codeville user speaks

Fraser Speirs has an informative post about Git which concludes with:

I don’t hear anything about arch, monotone, BitKeeper, codeville, SVK or darcs from anywhere except the nerdiest of SCM nerds.

Git has also been getting attention from Michael Tsai, John Gruber, and Digital Web.

I’m not a SCM nerd. I’ve never used Git, mostly because I’ve never had the time to check it out. But I am a Codeville user, and here are my thoughts about it.

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Tufte & Tiramisu

I went to the Edward Tufte talk on Tuesday with a bunch of people, including Michael Chu. Michael showed his Cooking for Engineers Tiramisu recipe card design to Tufte during office hours, and then he showed it to us at lunch. We talked a bit about how to redesign it. The design must be done with just standard HTML and CSS — no images.

Here’s my version, and my motivations:

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Eat your heart out, Google Browser Sync

I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend Glyphobet Browser Sync as an alternative to Google Browser Sync. Here it is:

rsync -av --delete user@remote.host:~/.mozilla/ .mozilla/

Some of the great advantages to Glyphobet Browser Sync include the fact that all your browser settings are transmitted securely over SSH, are password protected by UNiX file ownership and permissions,1 and do not require the presence of a large corporation with a dubious privacy & security track record. Plus Glyphobet Browser Sync takes advantage of industry standard technologies, just like MacOS X.

  1. Not all features available under MS Windows. [↩]

Shame on you

The Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy is to tell the American press how hard our troops are working to train Iraqis and how everything is set for the Iraqi government to take over.

Nevermind that there’s absolutely no hard evidence being offered to demonstrate that things actually are getting better. No evidence of a drop in casualties or violence. No evidence of improvements in security, no increases in successfully trained Iraqi police, no economic development, no increases in foreign investment. And there is no functioning Iraqi parliament that’s actually capable of passing laws and making policy decisions.

This is the same old Bush administration strategy; repeat anything enough and people will start to believe it. What’s coming next is scarier.

Six months or a year down the line, when the Iraqi government is still failing to provide security, services, or make policy decisions, the Bush administration is going to throw up its hands and say “Too bad, we tried, but those pesky Iraqis just couldn’t pull it together.” And then they’ll pull out the troops. If you believe what the administration has been saying, it will sound like the screaming failure of this occupation wasn’t their fault. Can you say “cut-and-run,” Mr. Bush? They don’t care about trying to fix the mess they’ve made, or taking responsibility for an ill-concieved invasion; no, they care about saving face and getting out. And the Iraqi people whose lives are actually affected by the fiasco? They aren’t the voters who will elect the next president, so the adminstration doesn’t care.

Probably this will happen sometime before next November, clearing the way for Romney, Giuliani, Gingrich, or McCain to try wash the stain of the war off of the Republican party. What’s coming next, though, is the scariest.

Enough Democrats have just rolled over to pass a war funding bill without a deadline. That’s right, some of the same Democrats who were elected en masse in an election that was a referendum on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy are now following the policy of that same administration. An administration with an approval rating of less than 30%. Shame on you for defecting. And shame on the Democratic leadership for not preventing these defections. Shame, shame, shame.

Why god Xerox PARC invented laptops

This afternoon, on the corner near my house, I noticed a homeless looking guy with a hand cart covered in black plastic bags holed up in the bus shelter in front of the corner coffee shop. Something didn’t look right, and on second glance I saw a cord hanging down from the bus shelter connected to his cart. At first I wondered if he had one of those intravenous bags on wheels. But it turned out he was getting online.

That’s right. Five minutes later, on my way back from the store, I took a closer look. He had plugged in to the light fixture inside the bus shelter with an extension cord, and he had a terribly beat-up flat screen hanging off of his cart. A keyboard lay on his lap as he sat cross legged on the concrete inside the bus shelter. Another keyboard stuck out of his cart. I can only assume he picked that spot because of the free wireless from the cafe behind him.

He also had all the stereotypical hallmarks of a homeless person — beat up clothes, dirty hands, scruffy beard, disheveled hair, tanned skin, and a cart wrapped in ripped black trash-bags. I couldn’t see what was on the screen — it was too bright out. I guess everybody needs their MySpace fix.

It’s not you, babe. It’s not me either. It’s the website.

This is the story of a girl, a boy, and the website that came between them.

Many years ago now, I signed up for every online dating website I could find. I’ll spare you the list of excuses and protestations that I am actually capable of meeting girls in real life; all that matters is that I like to check out every website I can — because it’s my job, and because it’s interesting.

I once paid a little bit for what was, at the time, the best of the sites. To protect the icompeten– I mean, the innocent, I’ll just call this site www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com.

There’s a kind of paradox of profit in the online dating industry. To be a successfull company, you have to actually successfully connect people, which means they are no longer customers. Your customers are paying you — even if your site’s entirely ad-driven — to make them non-customers as quickly as possible. If there’s a clever way around this, I don’t know what it is.

Over the years, www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com got worse and worse. Although I initially paid for “credits” which could be used to send messages at any time, they converted to an exorbitant monthly fee system, and instituted a rigid caste system much like India had for centuries, with “Gold” (Desperate and loaded), “Silver” (Desperate or loaded, but not both), and “Standard” (Broke, sexually confused, deceased, or untouchable).

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Another Unicode omission

Why isn’t the play/pause/stop/record family of icons in Unicode? It includes the four suits on modern playing cards, every mathematical symbol ever used, and a number of now obsolete languages. Shouldn’t it also include what is a ubiquitous set of about eight icons used on everything from 8-tracks to iPods? There’s even a nice spot for them, right next to ⏏ (eject).

This has been discussed at least twice on the unicode mailing list, but no decision was reached either time. It seems that some people think the icons should be included because they would be useful, and others think they should be excluded because it would open the door to including every pictogram and icon in use on every toolbar and consumer electronic in existence. The latter seems like a very flimsy argument to me; the argument for including them stems from their ubiquity, which would prevent every other symbol in use from piggybacking their way into the character set. In fact, the only symbol more ubiquitous is probably the “power” symbol; it should also be included. And most of the symbols already included in the “Miscellaneous Technical” chart are far more obscure.

Update 2007-05-10: The unicode people graciously responded to my email regarding this, and it sounds like it would require an evangelist to encourage the inclusion of these symbols before it happened. It’s so awesome when a standards organization actually responds to the needs of its users.

Anachronistic icons?

There’s an evolving alphabet of pictograms in software design. When presented with an unfamiliar (web or desktop) application, we users expect to read a tool-bar of icons and know what each does. The text editor in WordPress has icons for bold, italic, strikeout, bullet & numbered lists, left, center, and right aligned text, and so on. Firefox has forward, back, stop, reload and home.

It is striking how many of these icons are both ubiquitous and depictions of objects that are so obsolete that the average person may have never seen an example of the object in real life. Consider these, which are extremely obscure:

  • skeleton key (for security, as in older Netscapes)
  • ship steering wheel (remember Netscape’s icon?)
  • hourglass (in older Windows and Mac OS Classic)
  • shield, for security (eg. Windows XP security center)
  • reel-to-reel tape or film spool (in numerous media applications)
  • floppy disk (for save) how long has it been, really, since you’ve seen a floppy disk?
  • polaroid photo (to mean photos) these too are nearly obsolete

It is totally concievable that a younger person might never have seen one of these items in real life, and it’s certainly true that they are extremely rare in everyone’s life today. And there is another set of pictograms that are nearly as rare, although everyone has probably seen them at one point or another:

  • compass (eg. Safari)
  • typewriter (for word processing / keyboard settings)
  • 1960s-1980s style Bell telephone (still easily found in network software)
  • artist’s paint palette (for colors / artwork)
  • life preserver (for help)
  • old-style bell (for alerts or sounds)
  • magnifying glass (for zoom and view)
  • (extremely abstract) loudspeaker (for audio)

How long has it been since you’ve seen one of these items? For me, it’s been very long. There are at least two more which are common enough now but will likely become extremely rare in the next decade or so:

  • incandescent lightbulb
  • film frame with perforations

Do you expect these icons will get replaced with a flourescent lightbulb or some sort of pictogram representing digital photography? Doubtful.

In fact, the only real common pictograms representing real, common things are:

  • document
  • trash can (including its legally sanitized versions “wastebasket” and “recycle bin”)
  • folder
  • book
  • house (for home)
  • hand (for moving and pointing)
  • globe

Of course, every specific application has specific real-world icons, but the set of icons representing really common, everyday things is suprisingly small. I wouldn’t want to leave out the vast number of completely abstract icons:

  • arrows for up, down, back, forward, refresh, and so on
  • the play, pause stop & so on family of media player icons
  • plus
  • minus
  • checkmark
  • x for cancel
  • star (for new or notice me)

And then there’s the wizard’s magic wand, which shows up in artistic applications and in configuration wizards; no-one has ever seen a real magic wand, because they don’t really exist. Which brings us closer to an explanation of why so many of these icons are vanishingly rare: the icons are not drawn from real life. They are drawn from a visual tradition of Western culture, extending back at least as far as the the history of film, at the beginning of the 20th century. Look back again at the first two lists of exceedingly rare items: how hard do you have to think to name a film, or a comic book, or a television show, where you saw each of these items. It’s not hard at all – you could probably find an image of all these things in a single evening of sitcom TV, saturday morning cartoons, or in a handful of comic books. I can name movies off the top of my head with each as well:

  • skeleton key: Any old horror film
  • ship steering wheel: Jason & The Argonauts
  • hourglass: The Princess Bride
  • shield: Roman soldiers in The History of the World
  • reel-to-reel tape or film spool: Pulp fiction
  • floppy disk: Hackers
  • polaroid photo: Amelie
  • compass: Blair Witch Project
  • typewriter: Naked Lunch (how could you forget?)
  • 1960s-1980s style Bell telephone: All The President’s Men
  • artist’s paint palette: The Big Lebowski
  • life preserver: Radiers of the Lost Ark
  • old-style bell: Steamboat Willie
  • magnifying glass: Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
  • loudspeaker: again, Raiders of the Lost Ark

And of course, there’s Harry Potter for the magic wand.

So the next time you go hunting for the perfect idea for that new toolbar icon, don’t just look around you. Watch some TV, read a comic book, or rent a movie. The visual tradition available to you is much richer that you might imagine.