Disappearing into the Fire

The Monster In Your Head » Disappearing into the Fire:

David Whyte—a brilliant poet who, among others things, speaks to and consults with large corporations, describes well an aspect of why the burden is so keenly felt:

There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.

How many of  us create companies, create products where our blood and bone fuse with the glaze to create something so exquisite as to never have existed before? How romantically seductive is the image of giving one’s all to the fire? After all, as Whyte says:

Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.

I have to understand this viscerally if I’m going to be of service to my clients. But I have to be mindful, too, of the cost. In disappearing into the kiln, the potter created the most meaningful thing possible. But in the end, he ceased to exist.

(Via @fredwilson.)

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You'll be a Man, My Son!

Poems - If—:

IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

It goes on

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Title Style

Mac Dev Center: Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Text:

Title style means that you capitalize every word except:

• Articles (a, an, the)

• Coordinating conjunctions (and, or)

• Prepositions of four or fewer letters, except when the preposition is part of a verb phrase, as in “Starting Up the Computer.”

In title style, always capitalize the first and last word, even if it is an article, a conjunction, or a preposition of four or fewer letters.

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It is Unwise to Stray

Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers :

It is unwise to stray far from the obvious and simple, lest untoward effects result elsewhere.

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Procrastination as Comfort Zone

Seth's Blog: Modern procrastination:

The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn’t ship and most of all, busywork.

These represent safety, because if you don’t challenge the status quo, you can’t be made fun of, can’t fail, can’t be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything…

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

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The Parable of the Ham

The New York Times > Dining & Wine > At My Table | Nigella Lawson: An Inheritance of Flavors and Colors:

I remember once hearing a radio program about how recipes are passed on from one generation to the next, in this case, from grandmother to mother to daughter.

The daughter was talking about the pot roast she always made, beginning with the instructions: “Cut the ends off your piece of meat.” Asked why she did this, she said, “Because my mother always did.” The next interview was with her mother, who explained why she followed this seemingly important initial step: it was how she had seen her mother do it.

When the radio host asked the grandmother why it was necessary to cut the ends off the joint of meat before making a pot roast, she said, “Oh, it was because I didn’t have a pot big enough.”

So we credit recipes with much more authority than they necessarily deserve. It might be better to regard them really as more of an account of a way of cooking a dish rather than a do-this-or-die barrage of instructions.

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Delegated vs. Federated ID

Introducing ‘Sign-in with Twitter’, OAuth-Style “Connect” « hueniverse:

It is important to understand that there are two different kind of single-sign-on solutions: delegated and federated. All the recent comparisons between OpenID and Facebook Connect failed to appreciate this fundamental difference. Facebook Connect is a delegated authentication service, while OpenID is a federated authentication service. They might offer very similar features, but they are very different.

A delegated solution means that one site is simply outsourcing its authentication needs to another pre-selected site. If your site uses Facebook Connect, you are delegating your authentication facilities to Facebook. Visitors to your site cannot use any other accounts, only accounts from the vendors you have pre-selected.

A federated solution means that visitors to your site can use any account they have, as long as it is compatible. It makes no difference to the site which account is being used, as long as it can interoperate. At its core, OpenID is a federated solution because its most important feature is the ability to use any OpenID account with any OpenID-enabled service.

(Via @cshirky.)

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You Can’t Force Creativity

idApostle: An Identity Love Affair / Why Design Can’t be Billed by the Hour:

You really can’t force creativity to happen. There are ways to encourage it and a process is there to help direct it, but in the end it has to just happen. So while a project may only take an hour at a desk, I can assure you more time was spent thinking about it.

(Via @smashingmag.)

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The Real Work

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Future Shock:

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

(Via iPhone Development.)

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Do Not Read

Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia:

Having five more years of development experience under my belt, I no longer believe that classic Larson strip is specific to dialog boxes.

The plain fact is users will not read anything you put on the screen.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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It’s Not Always About You

iPhone Development: Failure to Think Different:

I’m sure somebody has told you all this before, but let me point it out again: it’s not always about you. Products can be successful even if they aren’t right for you… I’m a techie, but I don’t need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don’t hate my dishwasher because I can’t get to the command line. I don’t hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system.

(Via Alan Quatermain.)

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The Value of Abstraction

stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been...:

When I learned to drive, my dad insisted that I learn on a manual transmission so I would be able to drive any car. I think this was a wise and valuable thing to do.

But even having learned it, these days I drive an automatic. Nothing is black and white — I sacrifice maybe a tiny amount of fuel efficiency and a certain amount of control over my car in adverse situations that I generally never encounter. In exchange, my brain is freed up to focus on the the road ahead, getting where I’m going, and avoiding obstacles (strategy), not the minutiae of choosing the best possible gear ratio (tactics).

Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It’s likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who drives.

(Via ranchero.com.)

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Adapting to the Environment

stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been...:

Staying with floppies would have spared us the inconvenience of that transition but at what long-term cost?

Nothing is ever simply black or white. There was a cost to making the transition. But there was a benefit to doing so.

To change was not all good. To stay put was not all bad. But there was a ratio of goodness-to-badness that, in the long run, was quite favorable for everyone involved. However in the short term it seemed so insurmountable, so ludicrous, that it beggared the belief of a large number of otherwise very intelligent people.

For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being spent.

(Via ranchero.com.)

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Holden Caulfield vs. Starman Jones

From the Whatever Archives: “Holden Caulfield in Middle Age” « Whatever:

Fact is, I liked neither Holden nor the book. One can recognize the book has a certain literary merit without needing to like the thing, of course. But it’s more to the point to say that Holden has a certain fundamental passivity that I dislike — the desire for people and things to be different without the accompanying acceptance of personal responsibility to effect those changes. To go back to Heinlein and his juvy novels, his teenage characters are not very big on internal lives, but they’re also the sort who go out, do things, fail, do things again, and eventually get it right. Holden merely wishes, ultimately a man of inaction. He’s a failure — a particularly attractive failure if you’re of a certain age and disposition, admittedly, but a failure nonetheless. I remember reading the book as a teen and being irritated with Holden for that reason; I couldn’t see why he required any sympathy from me, or why I should empathize with him.

I always liked Heinlein’s characters and could never really relate to Catcher in the Rye. It never occurred to my to analyze why, but I think John nails it here.

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Better Fooled Than Suspicious

iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry:

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick¹. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

---

1. The reference is from Chapter 5 of Howard’s End and is actually called the “want-of-confidence trick,” but the point is the same. ↩

   “You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

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No Other Way to Find Out

Coding Horror: Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway:

Reasons for failure on a… project are legion.

At the end of the development cycle, you end up with [a system] that is a pale shadow of the shining, glorious monument to… engineering that you envisioned when you started.

It’s tempting, at this point, to throw in the towel — to add more time to the schedule so you can get it right before shipping… Because, after all, real developers ship.

I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake.

Yes, you did a ton of things wrong on this project. But you also did a ton of things wrong that you don’t know about yet. And there’s no other way to find out what those things are until you ship this version and get it in front of users and customers.

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The View from the Dorkosphere

The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed - apple ipad - Gizmodo:

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.

(Via @Pogue.)

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What are You Measuring?

We = (what we eat) – (what they eat) « Jon Udell:

We have traditionally measured the energy content of food by comparing input (the food we eat) and output (the feces we excrete). Burn both in a calorimeter, subtract, and the difference is the energy that was extracted from the food.

Yes, but extracted by whom? Or rather, by what? The energy that we humans take from our food has almost all been extracted by the time it reaches the end of the small intestine. But it has a long way to go yet. It must also pass through the large intestine, where dwell a myriad of gut flora. And they, Wrangham says, are hungry. If you eat a raw banana you only get some of its energy, and they get most of the remainder. If you eat a cooked banana, though, you get a lot more of its energy and leave less for them. The end result looks the same, but the internal distribution is quite different.

So you need to compare the energy in food entering the mouth to the energy remaining in the digestive products leaving the small intestine. Only then does the dramatic difference between the energies we get from raw versus cooked food become evident.

This is a great parable about instrumentation, measurement, knowledge, and epistemology. What other profound errors of basic understanding arise from misplaced instrumentation? And what might we learn by making simple — and in retrospect obvious — adjustments?

(Via kottke.org.)

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What is Your Flight Distance?

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution:

We are puzzled, because our own risk aversion (or that of our safari guide) keeps us firmly inside the Land Rover even though we have no reason to think there is a lion within miles. This is because we have nothing to set against our fear. We are going to get our square meals back at the safari lodge. Our wild ancestors would have had much more sympathy with the risk-taking zebras. Like the zebras, they had to balance the risk of being eaten against the risk of not eating. Sure, the lion might attack; but, depending on the size of your troop, the odds were that it would catch another member of it rather than you. And if you never ventured on to the feeding grounds, or down to the waterhole, you’d die anyway, of hunger or thirst. It is a lesson in economic trade-offs.

The bottom line of that digression is that the wild wolf, like any other animal, will have an optimal flight distance, nicely poised — and potentially flexible — between too bold and too flighty.

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Our Technical Goals

Pinboard Blog:

Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible. A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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Cautious Reflection About “How” We Change

As George Santayana is often quoted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Since I believe that is true, it is worth looking back at another, less often quoted individual — Melvin Conway. He was a programmer in the 1960s. He wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220, he wrote a paper on coroutines, but the reason we know him at all, is that he is credited with coining Conway’s Law. Unlike other, so-called “Laws,” Conway’s Law was not intended as a joke, but rather as a valid observation of how real organizations make things.

In 1968, Conway wrote a paper called “How Do Committees Invent?” In it, he wrote:

…organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

This is more commonly quoted as, “Any development project reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”

As we move forward in an environment of change, it is important that we keep this in mind.

To see how this manifests itself in the real world, please read this blog entry from one of the Vista programmers on how they developed a particular feature for which he was responsible. While you are reading, see if you find any of what he says familiar. If you do, consider that we may need to address those issues ourselves as we try to move forward.

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Link Layer Discovery Protocol

We have had some conversations lately over the use of link layer protocols to discover the local network topology. Specifically, some of our devices attempt to identify their neighbors using Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). Other devices do not understand the protocol and propagate these link layer packets. Depending on the size of the network, this may be causing problems. It turns out that we are not the only ones to have this issue and the industry has been addressing the issue by standardizing a Link Layer Discover Protocol (LLDP) in IEEE 802.1AB. In addition, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has created an enhancement called Media Endpoint Discovery. This enhancement addresses Voice over IP (VoIP) deployment and troubleshooting issues.

References

A. Bierman and K. Jones, ‘Physical Topology MIB’, The Internet Engineering Task Force Request For Comments Repository (September 2000) <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2922.txt> [accessed Tuesday, April 3, 2007]

IEEE Computer Society LAN/MAN Standards Committee, ‘IEEE Std 802.1AB^TM-2005 — Station and Media Access Control Connectivity Discovery’, IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks (6 May 2005) <http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1AB-2005.pdf> [accessed Tuesday, April 3, 2007]

Telecommunications Industry Association, ‘Link Layer Discovery Protocol for Media Endpoint Devices’, TIA Standards, Telecommunications, IP Telephony Infrastructure (April 6, 2006) <http://www.tiaonline.org/standards/technology/voip/documents/ANSI-TIA-1057_final_for_publication.pdf> [accessed Tuesday, April 3, 2007]

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Information for visitors

I work for the Pennsylvania State University in Telecommunications and Networking Services, a unit of Information Technology Services. If you are planning to visit, you might want to look at some maps of the campus. If you are concerned about the weather, you might want to make sure we have not had a school closing before you visit. You might also want to make sure we are not out on a staff holiday. If you need to find me, you should look at my current directory entry. If you need to contact anyone else, you can look them up in our directory as well.

If you need a place to stay you might want to try the Penn Stater or the Nittany Lion Inn.

You can read about what is happening on campus in the student newspaper or through Penn State Live. On your way in, you might want to listen to our local public radio station.

If you need some entertainment while you are in town, you might want to see what is playing at the Bryce Jordan Center or the Center for the Performing Arts. If you want to catch a game, you might want to check out what is happening in Penn State Athletics. If you are more of the outdoor type you might want to spend some time at the Shaver's Creek Environmental Center or the Stone Valley Recreation Area or you might even hike Mount Nittany. If you are more of the "long hair" type, you might want to take a stroll through the Palmer Museum of Art. If you are going to be here during the month of August, you might want to try to catch Ag Progress Days.

Of course, no trip to Penn State would be complete without a visit to the new Berkey Creamery where you can sample a few of the approximately 110 flavors of ice cream that the food science students make from the milk from the university's 175-cow herd.

If you are interested in taking a few classes, you might want to see what Penn State Continuing Education is offering or you could take a few classes over the Internet - even get an MBA - through the Penn State World Campus.

If you need some computer hardware or software you can visit the showroom of Penn State's Computer Store or even order it online. If you need some books, clothing, or souvenirs of your visit, you can stop by the Penn State Bookstore.

If, after looking at all of this, you decide you want to join us working here at Penn State, you might want to take a look at our job opportunities.

The University Libraries provide access to many of their resources through the Library Information Access System (LIAS).

If you think you need a workout, you can get a Recreational Sports Fitness membership.

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