Earworm
It looks as though the Echo Nest’s APIs might have transitioned from the “umm…” zone into the “mmm!…” zone, where they’re demonstrated simply enough that I can climb the learning curve. Interesting and powerful stuff.
(warning to children)
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives – he then unties the string.
- robert graves
(skilfully curled)
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
- e.e. cummings
Ab Initio
I’m learning lots of new things from first principles. Smart people, fun and friendly environment, getting things done. I think I’m going to really enjoy working here.
Moving along
My time at Microsoft is coming to an end this week. I’ll be moving on to an exciting new gig with an interesting software company, and I’m really looking forward to that.
workspace out of sync
no alarms, no surprises
respectful adieu
It’s been a long journey. I joined Groove back in 2002, after folding my Groove-based development shop (Cabezal), which I’d started after getting quite excited about Groove while working at Agora. A few months after joining the company, I moved to Massachusetts and dragged the family along. (They’re all American now, I think.) Eight years later, we’re still shipping basically the same product – Groove – although the name changes to SharePoint Workspace for the Office 2010 release, reflecting some of the things I’ve been working on. Lots of people use the stuff we’ve made, and even more will in the future, and that feels good.
Along the way I’ve helped build a few seriously cool things, made some great contributions, several boneheaded mistakes, and some good friends. I’ll miss the team in Beverly, and I hope they’ll let me drop in to the swanky Memorial Drive offices occasionally, to gaze across the Charles at that hill of beans. Microsoft is a seriously amazing company with enormous potential, and a lot of discipline (and some passion) around making things happen.
Next week: start from a beginning.
Coders At Work
I’ve done a lot of traveling this month. While on the bus and plane, I’ve been reading. One book has kept me fascinated for the whole month’s worth of trips: Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel.
The book consists of a series of informal interviews with some of the great software engineers. And they’re a fascinating cast of characters indeed. Fran Allen, who taught Fortran in the late 50s and went on to pioneer compiler development and high-performance computing for the ensuing half century. At the other end of the age spectrum, Brad Fitzpatrick, scary-smart creator of LiveJournal and memcached. Don Knuth. Brendan Eich (JavaScript) and Doug Crockford (JavaScript, Habitat). Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk), Guy Steele (Scheme), Joe Armstrong (Erlang) and Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell); and more besides. They’re talking about the process of building software — how to approach a problem, how they debug — but also the context it’s built in: Netscape, PARC, Google, BBN, academia.
Seibel: What about The Art of Computer Programming? Some of the people I’ve talked to on this have absolutely read it from cover to cover. Some people have it on the shelf and use it as a reference. And some people just have it on the shelf.
Norvig: At one point I had it as my monitor stand because it was one of the biggest set of books I had, and it was just the right height. That was nice because it was always there, and I guess then I was more prone to use it as a reference because it was just right in front of me.
Seibel: But you had to lift up the monitor every time you wanted to look at it?
Norvig: No, I had the box set…
I found the entire enterprise quite a challenging journey. I see parallels in some of the old-timers’ experiences to my own. (My teenage evenings from 1980 onward were spent in a closet at school, bashing code on a noisy machine-oil ASR33, connecting through the Prime to all sorts of interesting machines on JANET and beyond). I’ve dabbled with most of the important architectures. But the only large software I’ve written at all recently is an iterator-based convolution pipeline, and that was really done to win a bet with Daniel about stereo sound quality. My workdays now are spent wrangling email and fighting project fires, rather than really building “soft machines of elegance and substance”.
Above all I came away with a feeling that this field is still where I have to spend my time. “Ich kann nicht anders”. The power of software is exploding still. We’ve had the Big Bang; now while data centers scale to petaflops of unreliable racks, multicore RISC silicon struggles with milliwatt power budgets to keep the phone alive all day. Several of the book’s subjects are at Google, but Java may yet weigh that company down, while C# seems to be evolving into slippery-quickly Lisp. We don’t yet really have a science of software development. And we certainly don’t have any lack of challenges to be met.
Networks of smart machines will save the world yet. If you have any interest in how and why we came to this place, you should read this book.
Moonalice
Here’s a fascinating and challenging talk by Roger McNamee (to a group in Bend, Oregon). Roger has an interesting career: tech analyst, investor, and he plays guitar in a very competent band from the San Francisco scene.
The first Moonalice track I listened to was a rather dirigible cover of Sugaree. I heard it on my cellphone by following @moonalice; yes folks, this is a band that broadcasts their live shows on Twitter. Moonalice also have a nice app on the Palm Pre, which switches wallpaper every hour (or day or week, but hourly works good) to one after another of their excellent promotional posters. Part of Roger’s presentation is describing their “cut out the middleman” approach to building a band, and it’s really quite smart. I’m prima facie evidence that it works; if they come to Boston I’ll very likely notice, and probably go see them.
“If it works for building a band, it’s going to work for a real business”…
Twit
Ah, it seems the blog is still here, so I have a place to write more considered things than the pithy stream of tweets. I wonder, should I tell anyone?
Good Morning Obama
Well well. It really is a historic day, and I’m looking forward to the ceremonies.
With luck, our new President will have something interesting to say, the beginning of a process that will bring millions of his countrymen — and I can begin to count myself among them now — to bend the arc of history together.
Today’s reading is from Dr. King, whose work the passage of time has not made less inspirational and practical and relevant.
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…”
I’m angry. Angry at the way the USA has developed over the time I’ve been here. Angry at the mendacious idiots who, standing on the fingers of giants, trampled the constitution of this once proud nation into rags, secretly declaring that the executive could ignore and redefine any laws it chose, at its whim, in secret. Angry at their acts abroad and at home, prosecuting illegal wars, enabling torture, allowing whole cities to be destroyed; anger that won’t be quenched unless there’s some justice done and seen to be done. Angry at the way ignorance is celebrated and elevated in this culture.
I’m angry at myself. Angry for being a bystander while atrocities happen. Fearful over the last seven years that I’ll be thrown out of my job or the country (or both, simultaneously, intertwined) if I say what I think needs to be said. Angry at the way I’ve dealt with that by retreating from media and immediacy and immersion and engagement. Angry at the many arguments with stupidity that I haven’t been bothered to fight out loud.
With two new avenues of hope — a tentatively newfound right of permanent stay in this great country, and an incoming administration that might prove itself worthy of respect — I need to find a way to engage with change, to channel that anger in positive ways. The next couple of years will be hard and dangerous; there are multiple long emergencies looming. But it’s past time to begin to change.
Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us…
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
I’m not sure what the next while will look like. But I know that to engage means to start by owning a sense of belonging: to say honestly and without reservation, “I belong here”. Here in the north shore of Massachusetts in these united states of America. Good morning.
Genetic Vectorizer
Via Ned, I came across Roger Alsing’s very cool genetic vectorizer: a little app which takes a photograph and “evolves” a small set of overlapping polygons to fit.
Here’s a video of the evolution progress, starting from one of Dylan’s photos:
(Warning: the video is huge, about 330MB).
My slightly modified version of Roger’s app, adding Dan Byström’s performance tweaks plus an AVI video generator, is here. Source to follow.