planet

Sacha Chua: What to do when you have a hard time listening to lectures: adapting as a visual learner

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0500

J- is taking Red Cross lifeguard lessons. She told us that she sometimes has a hard time understanding and remembering the concepts, so I shared a tip that worked for me and that might work for you.

Like J-, I’m a visual learner–perhaps way more than she is. I learn a lot from books and blogs, and I enjoy writing.

I’m not much of an audio learner. I used to fall asleep in classroom lectures. I get impatient when I listen to nonfiction audiobooks, podcasts, or webinars. I hardly even listen to music.

After struggling through some lecture-heavy university classes, I finally figured out how I could use my visual learning strengths to make up for my audio learning weaknesses. The trick is to read ahead whenever I can. Seeing the words gives me a visual “hook” to hang the ideas on when people talk about them. It gives me an outline that I can use to organize what I hear. If I read ahead, I understand what people say better, and it’s easier for me to stay engaged.

There are many situations where I can’t read ahead, such as meetings or presentations. In those situations, I keep my visual brain occupied by writing or drawing my notes. By turning important parts into words that I can see, I can remember things better. I can see the structure of a talk instead of trying to follow a linear narrative. Ideas don’t disappear into the foggy recesses of my brain.

Taking notes also has other benefits. Because I know I can share my notes afterwards, I pay more attention and look for more ideas that could be useful to other people. I’ve had lots of conversations because of my notes, and the conversations often lead to other discoveries.

As J- heads into high school, she’s going to need better learning strategies. W- and I are figuring out how we learned what we learned, and we hope to help her and other people learn things more effectively too. How do you use your learning strengths to deal with your learning weaknesses, and how do you build on those strengths for even more awesomeness?

Read the original or check out the comments on: What to do when you have a hard time listening to lectures: adapting as a visual learner (Sacha Chua's blog)

Smarterware: Designing the Todo.txt Android Widget

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:16 -0500

One of the most-requested features for Todo.txt Touch for Android is a homescreen widget that displays top priority tasks. Android widgets are subject to a set of even stricter visual and functional constraints than full-screen apps, so getting this feature right has been a challenge. Your smartphone's homescreen is meaningful, precious real estate, and this app's widget should treat it that way.

Visual design has never been my strength, so I decided to do this in public and learn from conversations and critiques along the way. On a late night last fall I dove into the widget's design, posting screenshots to Google+ as I went, and iterating based on the critiques and suggestions I got in the comments for each. This is a summary of the progression of that process.

First, our requirements. In priority order, the Todo.txt Android homescreen widget should:

Display a user's top 3 prioritized tasks from todo.txt.
Offer the ability to launch the fullscreen app.
Offer the ability to quickly add a new task from the widget.
Clearly communicate which app the widget is associated with, i.e., include some sort of Todo.txt branding.

Two important things to know: While 2.2 (Froyo) is shown in the screenshots, Todo.txt Touch's target SDK is Android 1.6 (Donut). I approached this using Foursquare's large widget as an example of good widget design.

Alpha 1

This was the first "it's ugly but it it works" implementation, which essentially reuses the fullscreen app's main interface.

Pros: Tasks are listed in priority order, with the right priority letter colors. The Add Task (+) button works. The widget is legible given any kind of wallpaper image, and the rounded corners and background color treatment make it look like the very useful Power Control widget.

Cons: The application logo and title take up way too much space. There's too much unused space next to the + button. The + button also gets lost in the header, and doesn't look like a tap target.

Google+ discussion

Alpha 2

Take two...

Pros: The application title no longer takes up an ungodly amount of space, and it no longer swallows up the the Add Task (+) button. Tasks appear at the top of the widget, flush with the top border, which gives them more visual priority.

Cons: If you read left to right, the application icon is the first thing you see when you look at this widget, which is not our priority. The most important information in this widget is not the application branding or UI, but the contents of the todo.txt itself. Lots of unused negative space here, especially at the bottom.

Google + discussion

Beta 1

Cooking with gas...

Pros: The top 3 items in the todo.txt are the first thing you see when you look at this widget. It has all the functionality it needs (launcher, branding, add task) while prioritizing the user's data over all else.

Cons: There's still a whole lot of unused space between the application icon and the Add Task (+) button. The widget has even more unused space if a user's tasks are not a certain length. The icon and the Add Task (+) button are unbalanced, size-wise.

Google+ discussion

Beta 2

Something worth testing on my actual phone...

Pros: All those of Beta 1, except the icon and Add Task (+) button are the same size and aligned, which is less consternating, visually.

Cons: After using this widget on my phone with my actual todo.txt for four months... Damn this is a big widget. Like the large Foursquare widget, you can't fit much more on the screen this widget appears on. Also, with short tasks, there's lots of wasted space. Wasted space annoys me, because it's a disrespectful use of my precious homescreen real estate.

Release Candidate 1

Size matters...

Pros: Takes up a lot less space on the screen, and uses the space within the widget itself more efficiently. No matter how long or short a task is, it will appear the same in this layout. Cutting off every task at the same point with the ellipsis gives each equal visual weight but still achieves the widget's information display goal; it's still obvious what each task is about. Lengthy tasks don't show up as busy wrapping walls of text.

Cons: The font here is small and may affect legibility. The tap targets are also small—perhaps too small. The + button doesn't look enough like a button. The background color feels dark and depressing.

While I think this version is good enough for v1 release, there's still more work to do. Users should have the ability to choose a light, dark, or transparent background for this widget, depending on their preference and wallpaper choice, and perhaps even a portrait layout. Those are on the roadmap.

In the meantime, a new release of Todo.txt Touch for Android, finally with a homescreen widget, will be available some time next week.

Sacha Chua: Squeezing another project in

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0500

Down to 11 business days before I leave IBM for my experiment in entrepreneurship. My manager wants to know if I can squeeze in working on a non-profit project and helping a developer learn Drupal skills on top of my current project, which is now in user acceptance testing. I say yes. There’s time to help people learn, and time to reduce the risk of future projects. My notes and braindumping and last-minute improvements to extracurricular interests can wait.

I needed to revise the documents of understanding. I had originally estimated and scoped the project assuming that it would be done by a developer with both experience in Drupal, familiarity with the particular nonprofit’s needs, and a thorough understanding of the codebase. This project involves making a site more configurable so that other organizations can deploy it easily. It will be used as a pattern for five or more sites, with the first ideally coming online this year.

To accommodate the risks, I simplified the tasks we planned to do, and reorganized the items in order to fit the timeline. As neat as it would be, we probably won’t need an installation profile or a distribution for five or so instances. I put the most complex tasks up first, before I leave, so that we can power through them with pair programming. With any luck, we’ll be able to complete the crucial parts of it before I go, and the remaining developer will be familiar enough with the key parts of the code to continue. She can turn to one of our coworkers for mentoring.

In the meantime, I’ve been checking tasks off my other project: mostly styling, with some minor content and functionality tweaks. The project manager is impressed because I get things back to her so quickly. I tell her I might work part-time on this and add another project over the next two weeks, which should be fine given the rate at which we find and fix the tasks for this one.

Looks like I might not be able to take that half-day of vacation after all. <laugh> No big deal – it’s all for an excellent cause, and maybe I can get the practice admin to have it paid out instead. Good to be making things happen!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Squeezing another project in (Sacha Chua's blog)

tychoish.com essays: Allowable Complexity

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I'm not sure I'd fully realized it before, but the key problems in systems administration--at least the kind that I interact with the most--are really manifestations of a tension between complexity and reliability.

Complex systems are often more capable flexible, so goes the theory. At the same time, complexity often leads to operational failure, as a larger number of moving parts leads to more potential points of failure. I think it's an age old engineering problem and I doubt that there are good practical answers.

I've been working on this writing project where I've been exploring a number of fundamental systems administration problem domains, so this kind of thing is on my mind. It seems, that the way to address the hard questions often come back to "what are the actual requirements, and are you willing to pay the premiums to make the complex systems reliable?"

Trade-offs around complexity also happen in software development proper: I've heard more than a few developers talk in the last few months weigh the complexity of using dynamic languages like Python for very large scale projects. While the quests and implications manifest differently for code, it seems like this is part of the same problem.

Rather than prattle on about various approaches, I'm just going to close out this post with a few open questions/thoughts:

What's the process for determining requirements that accounts for actual required complexity?
How do things that had previously been complex, become less complex?

Perhaps someone just has write the code in C or C++ and let it mature for a few years before administrators accept it as stable?
Is there an corresponding level of complexity threshold in software development and within software itself? (Likely yes,) and is it related to something intrinsic to particular design patterns, or to tooling (i.e. programming language implementations, compilers, and so forth.)

Might better developer tooling allow us to programs of larger scope in dynamic languages (perhaps?)

Reader submitted questions:

Your questions here.

Answers, or attempts thereat ?on the discussion page.

Smarterware: Why I am an atheist

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:00:13 -0500

Link: Why I am an atheist

The details differ, but the story arc of how Mark Jaquith became an atheist mirrors my own. Raised in a traditional Roman Catholic household, on the best days my religion bored me, on the worst, it made me feel like a terrible sinner. Every day, its contradictions and lack of fact-based logic troubled me. I felt no connection to or appreciation for the culture or community of the Church, especially its patriarchy, homophobia, and focus on sin and repentance. My parents were very religious, so I endured 12 years of Catholic school wearing a pleated plaid skirt and fearing the nuns who were my teachers. Dad was an usher, Mom a Communion minister, my brothers altar boys. In addition to Sundays, I daydreamed through morning Mass every weekday before school with Mom. I studied Latin (the only part I don't regret).

As an adult, after years of alternating between questioning and not caring, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion changed everything. Like Mark, becoming an atheist was an intensely clarifying transition for me. It was as if I put on glasses and saw the world clearly for the first time, after suffering from a severe case of myopia my entire life.

Mark's post is lengthy and not fit for the easily offended, but fully worth the read in a quiet place with an open mind.

Sacha Chua: Thinking about how to experiment with business and what I might want to do

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0500

“So, what are you going to do?” That’s always what people ask after I tell them that I’m leaving IBM in order to experiment with entrepreneurship.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. I explain that I haven’t yet experimented with anything that could be seen as competing with IBM, following our Business Conduct Guidelines – and that covers so much ground. I’m leaving without a solid business plan or a proven opportunity, just itch and curiosity and the sneaky suspicion that there’s probably at least one business that I can build considering how others have succeeded.

The first thing I’m going to do after I leave is to create a structure for experimenting. Despite the associated costs and paperwork, incorporation makes sense to me. Limiting the downside – building that part of the safety net – makes it easier to experiment.

How can I go about testing possible business ideas? There are some conventional things I’d like to try.

Writing: I love reading and writing. If I can combine that with drawing and design, maybe I can create engaging e-books that will help people save time and be inspired. People have earned money from information products, so this has worked for other people before. Some have even succeeded without sleazy marketing tactics and without preying on people’s greed, which is encouraging! =)

I can test this by researching topics I’m interested in, writing blog posts and chapters, and eventually building up to e-books for things that people might buy. I’ll be writing notes anyway, so I may as well invest time into making them more usable for others.

Coaching: I’ve gotten so much value from writing, presenting, and experimenting with life. People find these things intimidating. Maybe I can help build scaffolds so that people can gradually try things out, succeed, and then gain enough confidence to do things on their own. (And I can write about what we learn along the way!)

Self-tracking: I like the results I’ve been getting from tracking my life, and I’m curious about building and tailoring tools for other people’s lives. Can I turn that into a recurring source of income? We’ll see.

Sales and customer relationship management for development: Quite a few developers have told me that they don’t particularly enjoy this part of freelancing, and it’s one of the parts I’m actually the most curious about. Maybe I can get started by helping my friends take better care of their clients and leads, and then see if the arrangement works out well.

Community analysis tools: Considering the success of the Lotus Connections toolkit within IBM, it might be interesting to make it more available to other companies. Right now, some of the functionality is available externally in a plugin for Lotus Notes, but things are still difficult to adopt. If I write a new implementation from scratch and I build the tool based only on externally-accessible information, that might be okay. It’s been quite a useful service within IBM, and it would be great to share it with more companies.

Testing ideas: How meta is that? If I’m going to be testing lots of business ideas and possibly working with other people to help them test their business ideas, then it would be great to gradually build processes and infrastructure for doing so.

Freelance consulting and development: I want to focus on the other initiatives first before I get into freelancing. I’m reasonably confident that I can figure out freelancing (especially with a little help from my friends). The kinds of work I’m considering (consulting, web development, technical writing, data migration) are similar to my work at IBM, so there’s less uncertainty to resolve. Custom work often means fewer opportunities to build compounding value, and I’d like to see if I can build a business that can scale up beyond my time.

I’m looking for things in the sweet spot: the intersection between what people need, what I’m good at, and what I love to do. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably picked up a good sense of what I’m interested in and how I might help you (and lots of people like you!). Is this list missing something that would help you even rock more?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Thinking about how to experiment with business and what I might want to do (Sacha Chua's blog)

Smarterware: Good Tools Have Verb-Based Interfaces

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:01:19 -0500

I've switched to an iPhone as my primary mobile device because I'm dogfooding my new iOS app. Coming off of three straight years of Android, one of the toughest parts of the transition was losing the applications drawer. My new iPhone had so many screens of icons, all perfectly aligned in a grid, every one with rounded corners, all equal visual weight, nary a widget in site! I got dizzy swiping across the carousel of apps trying to find the one I needed. I decided to get all my apps onto 1 or 2 homescreens using folders that made it obvious what was where.

By default, when you drag one app onto another to create a folder, iOS suggests a folder name based on the apps' category, like "Reference", "Music," or "Productivity." I tried this for awhile, but these category names were so vague they didn't solve my problem, they just gave it a different shape. Instead of hunting for apps across homescreens, I pecked through multiple folders. ("Is Instagr.am in Photography or Social Networking?") I look at my phone's homescreen dozens of times a day, and I'm embarrassed to admit how much not getting it into a usable state bothered me.

Thinking it through, I realized this category-based naming convention just doesn't align with my basic mental construct of what software is. Organizing items by category makes sense in libraries and bookstores, on restaurant menus, in music and movies—but not apps. An app isn't consumable media. An app is a tool. It helps you perform an action, to do something. Modern programming languages and APIs are verb-based (think ?MyObject->setName() and and HTTP's GET and POST), and the user interface should be, too. That's when I settled on a verb-based folder system.

These tiny touchscreen mobile computers we carry around in our pockets are the ultimate multi-tool. I use my phone to read, shop, watch, listen, cook, play, navigate, share, jot, photograph, and chat, so I organized my apps just like that. The guiding question for where each app went was What do I DO with it? Here's a screenshot of my first pass at a verb-based interface using folders on my iPhone.

I've since learned how to put Newsstand into a folder, so I tucked it away in "Read." I left the four apps I use the most on the Dock for one-tap access.

Dr. Drang says I'm not going to like using folders, but after a couple of weeks and a few tweaks, I feel good about it. My brain has mapped the folder verbs I chose to the apps within much more naturally. I've since moved Instagr.am from "Photograph" to "Share" and that feels smoother than "Social Networking," which makes me think of Jesse Eisenberg. In the end it's all semantics, but simple, present-tense action verbs have a special power that all software designers should respect.

Since organizing my iPhone homescreen this way, I've been taking note of verb-based interfaces done well and not so well.

The new-new Twitter interface revolves around three verbs and two nouns: "Tweet," Connect," "Discover," "Me," and "Home." While I appreciate the attempt at a majority verb-based interface, some of the choices about what goes where aren't intuitive. For example, "Direct Messages" are not under "Connect," they're under "Me."

Virgin America airline's Red system appears on the touchscreen on the back of every seat on their airplanes. The prompt reads "What do you want to do?" and the choices are "watch," "listen," "play," "eat", "shop", and the one that breaks the one-word-verb pattern, "kids play." Expand the quick nav and nouns are listed under each verb. (Under "watch," there's "on demand movies," "foreign films," "satellite tv," etc.) Well done.

While ThinkUp's project page is verb-heavy, its user interface isn't as much as it should be. As we iterate the app, we'll do well to take some of this thinking into its future releases.

tychoish.com essays: Persistent Emacs Daemons

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I've been subject to a rather annoying emacs bug for months. Basically, when you start emacs with the --daemon switch, and the X11 session exits, and any emacs frames are open, then the emacs process dies. No warning. The whole point, to my mind, of the daemon mode is to allows emacs sessions to persist beyond the current X11 session.

This shouldn't happen. I think this is the relevant bug report, but I seem to remember that the issue has something to do with the way that GTK interacts with the X11 session and emacs's frames. It's something of a deadlock: the GTK has no real need to fix the bug (and/or it's a behavior that they rely on for other uses,) and it might not really be possible or feasible for emacs to work around this issue.1

I also think that it's probably fair to say that daemon mode represent a small minority all emacs usage.

Regardless, I've figured out the workaround:

.. don't use GTK.

Turns out, it's totally possible to build GNU emacs without GTK, by using the "Lucid" build. Which is to say, use the windowing system kit built for Lucid Emacs (i.e. XEmacs,) rather than GTK. I was able, using the code below, to get an emacs experience with the new build that seems identical2 to the one I used to get with GTK, except without the frustrating crashes every time that X11 spazzed when I decided to unplug a monitor or some such. A welcome improvement, indeed.

The following emacs-lisp covers all of the relevant configuration of the "look and feel" of my emacs session. Install the Inconsolata font if you haven't already, you'll be glad you did.

 (setq-default inhibit-startup-message 't
               initial-scratch-message 'nil
               save-place t
               scroll-bar-mode nil
               tool-bar-mode nil
               menu-bar-mode nil
               scroll-margin 0
               indent-tabs-mode nil
               flyspell-issue-message-flag 'nil
               size-indication-mode t
               scroll-conservatively 25
               scroll-preserve-screen-position 1
               cursor-in-non-selected-windows nil)

 (setq default-frame-alist '((font-backend . "xft")
                             (font . "Inconsolata-14")
                             (vertical-scroll-bars . 0)
                             (menu-bar-lines . 0)
                             (tool-bar-lines . 0)
                             (alpha 86 84)))

 (tool-bar-mode -1)
 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
 (menu-bar-mode -1)

Hope this helps you and/or anyone else that might have run into this problem.

I'd like to add the citation and more information here, but can't find it. ↩
To be fair, I mostly don't use the GUI elements in emacs, though having emacs instances outside of the terminal is nice for displaying images when using emacs-w3m, and for having a little bit of additional display flexibility for some more rich modes. ↩

Sacha Chua: Notes from the Ontario Science Centre field trip

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:36:54 -0500

W- and I volunteered for the school’s field trip to the Ontario Science Centre.

On the bus ride there, I saw this curious case of two kids wedged into one seat. There was an empty seat across the aisle.

One muttered, “I sat here first.”

“No, I got here first.”

“No, I was first.”

“No, I was here first.”

This fruitless exchange lasted three minutes with little variation. Both were aware of the empty seat, which stayed unoccupied even as the bus filled. Both argued over this one seat anyway, and about being right.

Eventually the girl stood. She dried her tears behind her papers and looked glum the rest of the ride.

Isn’t it odd how we get drawn into wanting to be right instead of wanting to be better?

—-

The special exhibition focused on models of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions. The teachers asked the students to sketch at least two of the models in the provided journals, and to complete questionnaires. The students had one hour to do their the assignment. There were four groups, one for each parent volunteer.

As the doors opened, the students spread throughout the area. Some sat before the scale models of various inventions: an air screw, a wire-controlled bird, a lion designed to dispense lilies from its mouth. Others were fascinated by the interactive displays on the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and other creations.

I quickly gave up on trying to keep track of the students in my group. Instead, I browsed the exhibits, occasionally nudging students who had gotten distracted and hadn’t started on their work. It was interesting to see the differences: the students who had come with pencils and sharpeners, the students who scrambled to borrow; the students who completed their work, the students who pursued other interests even outside the questionnaire.

—-

After the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition and a quick head-count, we gathered for lunch. W-, J-, and I tucked into the sandwiches we made with bread I baked this weekend. Mmm.

—-

The students had an hour to explore other exhibits after lunch. It was impossible to keep everyone together, but fortunately they were old enough to be responsible for reassembling near the lockers at 1:45 PM. There were a few primary school field trips on at the same time, and coordinating those must have been much more of a challenge.

The students moved through the exhibits in a loose crowd. People left and rejoined the groups. They chatted with their friends and played with exhibits, mostly ignoring their questionnaires. At the end of the day, many of them said they enjoyed the trip very much. By this time, even the girl who had lost out in the seat battle had cheered up.

—-

I was tired after a full day surrounded by the tumult of teenagers, and it looked like all three of us needed introvert recharging time. J- tried to work on her history assignment after coming home, and she was totally out of it. W- encouraged her to take a break, and she headed into the living room.

I took my own introvert break by working on my computer and enjoying some tea. After my cup, I poked my head into the living room and found W- sharing some tips so that J- can handle her energy better. He told J- that instead of playing with her Nintendo DS when she felt her brain was tired, she should try resting her eyes and brain instead: napping, perhaps, or doing something like tidying up. Games can be distracting and overstimulating. They often leave you more tired than when you started.

W- shared ideas from The Hacker Ethic on how people do things for survival, social connection, or entertainment. We’d like to help J- raise the level of the things she does: to not do them just for survival (good grades), but to motivate herself by tapping social connections or perhaps even to find entertainment and fulfillment in doing the work.

It made me think about play as escape and play as reward. W- and I don’t use games to escape. We occasionally play, but more as a reward for ourselves after chores and duties are done, and because we’re curious about the cleverness designed into the games. Our vacations go even further – not escapes from daily responsibilities, but investments into relationships and routines. This is something that would be interesting for J- to learn how to do.

This is a long post today, but there was much to think about, and more still to digest and understand.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Notes from the Ontario Science Centre field trip (Sacha Chua's blog)

tychoish.com essays: The Laptop Riser that Changed My Life

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

tl;Dr> I got one of those nifty laptop risers that puts your laptop up closer to eye level, and it has pretty much improved all of my interactions with computers a thousand fold and it's made it possible for me to effectively use two screens. This post explores this.

One of my coworkers had a laptop stand she wasn't using and I asked to borrow it for an afternoon, and my neck stopped hurting. I never thought my neck hurt before, but apparently it does.

Or did.

But there's more: for years now I've kept an extra monitor around (and had one at work) but the truth is that I have never really felt like I've been able to get the most out of an external monitor.

Somehow, putting my laptop 4 inches in the air was the little change that made everything better. The laptop is generally on the left of the external monitor, and I have task lists, notes buffers, the chat window, and my status logging window on the laptop, and then three windows on the external (emacs buffer, terminal, emacs buffer) on the right. My primary focus centers between the monitors, but probably edges slightly toward the external, most of the time.

Also, I discovered that I--apparently--have a slight processing/attention defect whereby I find it painful and difficult to focus on things that are happening on the right side of the screen for any amount of time. Which is weird because my right eye has always been noticeably stronger. I'll ponder this more later.

My virtual desktops for email and web browsing are a bit less rigid, but the same basic idea. Somehow it seems to work. I've done a little bit of work recently to get the layouts right, to minimize the impact of the window management of most context switching (scripting various transitions, saving layouts, etc.) In all things are going great.

It strikes me that I've not posted here even a little about my setup in a while. The truth is that it's not terribly surprising and I've not changed very much recently. I'm back to one laptop, and as anxious as having one laptop makes me sometimes (I fear the lack of redundancy,) not having to keep it synced makes life easier. I've put some time into doing a little bit of polish on all of little bits of configuration/code that I have that makes my computing world go around, but mostly it's pretty good.

It's nice, and I'd write more about it, but I want to get back to getting things done around here. Exporting and exploring some of this stuff in greater depth is definitely on my list, so hang in there, and if there's something you particularly want to see, ?be in touch.

Sacha Chua: Mapping out what I’ve learned at IBM

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:21:41 -0500

We’re in the user acceptance phase for the project I’m working on. There are a number of small things to fix, styling issues that we’d put off until the base functionality was in place. So I fix things and send them back, waiting for feedback.

In the meantime, there’s time to write, and to work on other things. There’s a nonprofit project that I want to do as much as I can on before I go, and I want to leave notes for the next developer. There’s the Community Toolkit that I’d like to add more to before I go.

I’m mapping things out, seeing what else I can share. The things I’ve learned about collaboration have become part of what IBM knows; BlueIQ and wikis and community managers doing awesome things have taken it much further. The Community Toolkit has what I understand about the Connections API, and there are enough people who have used it and even tinkered with it to keep the idea going. The Idea Lab processes and tools have been in other people’s keeping for a year, and they’re doing well. There are people who do Drupal and who do Rails, and my notes are on my blog. This is good.

So now, in the gaps between things to do, I write about the other things I’ve learned from IBM. There’s a lot to write about, and I’ll see how much of it I can put together in the next three weeks. =)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Mapping out what I’ve learned at IBM (Sacha Chua's blog)

Sacha Chua: My CSS theming setup

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:07:06 -0500

“Why is your window transparent?” a coworker asked me when she noticed my screen. I told her about how I do my CSS theming, and she pulled another coworker over and made me repeat the explanation. Since that seems like something other people might find handy, here it is.

Sass: Syntactically Awesome Sytlesheets

I rarely do CSS/front-end theming work, but when I do, I try to make it as fun and easy as back-end development. I use Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) so that I can use nested selectors, variables, and mixins. This makes my code cleaner and easier to write. You’ll need Ruby in order to install Sass, but the tool will give you CSS that you can use on any web platform.

Browser-based tools

I prefer doing the initial tweaking in Google Chrome, because I like the way that the developer tools make it easy to modify the stylesheet. The Chrome CSS Reloader extension is handy, too. Most of the time, I make my CSS changes in the text editor, then use the CSS Reloader to reload the stylesheet without refreshing the page. This makes it easy to manually toggle the display of some elements while allowing me to refresh style rules. If I want to figure out the values for a few simple changes, I’ll sometimes make the changes directly in Chrome (you can use arrow keys to adjust values), then copy the values to my Sass source file.

Colors, sizes, and spaces

A second monitor is totally awesome and well worth it.

Designs rarely specify all the colours, sizes, and spacing needed. To quickly get the color of a pixel, I use WhatColor. This shows the hex code for colors, and allows me to quickly copy the code with the F12 shortcut key. If you want to change the shortcut key, the source is available as an ?AutoHotkey script.

To make it easier to match sizes and spaces, I use WinWarden to make my browser window 20% translucent. Then I carefully position it over my design reference until the important features match. Magnifixer makes it easier to line things up because it can magnify a fixed portion of the screen. By focusing Magnifixer on the part I’m working on, I can tweak CSS without straining my eyes.

When I know I’m going to be making a lot of changes, I use ?AutoHotkey to map a shortcut so that I can refresh the CSS with one keystroke instead of several. When I happen to have my USB foot pedal handy, I rig it up to refresh my stylesheet.

Regression testing

Sometimes my CSS changes modify other rules. Instead of laboriously checking each page after changes, I’ve figured out how to use Selenium ?WebDriver to write a Java program that loads the pages in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, capturing screenshots and numbering them according to the pages in my design reference. This means that I can run the program in the background or start it before taking a break, and then flip through all the screenshots when I get back.

Cross-browser testing

What’s CSS theming without the requirement of browser compatibility? Someday, when I need to deal with more browsers, I might look into Selenium RC. In the meantime, I develop in Chrome, my Selenium-based program makes it easier to test in Firefox and IE, and it’s easy enough to try the URLs in Safari as well. Virtual machines handle the rest of the requirements.

So that’s how I’ve been doing CSS theming on this project. What are your favourite tips?

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Smarterware: Google Going Evil is the Godwin’s Law of Tech Commentary

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:00:16 -0500

Google going evil has become the Godwin’s Law of tech commentary: "As ~~an online discussion~~ tech commentary about Google grows longer, the probability of ~~a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler~~ calling it evil approaches 1." Let's move beyond the sensationalist "evil" headlines and get clear on what's actually been going on recently.

The privacy policy consolidation was not as big a deal as everyone made it out to be. The Mocality fiasco was terrible, and Google was rightly mortified. We may all agree that Search Plus Your World smacks of AOL and/or Facebook, and that perhaps Google is having its Microsoft Moment, but please stop publishing "turning evil" headlines. It's an overused, scare-mongering hook, people. Instead, criticize what you don't like about what Google's doing using specific examples, and even better, code. If you're not a coder, then just take the time to educate readers about the specific disadvantages of what Google is doing and what the alternatives to their services are really like. We'll all be a lot smarter for it.

Related: The glut of hackneyed zingers about how Android isn't really "open."

Sacha Chua: Weekly review: Week ending January 27, 2012

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:30:00 -0500

I talked to my second-line manager (the manager of my manager) this week. It looks like all systems are go. Heading into my last three weeks at IBM! By golly.

This weekend was a busy one. I did a cooking sprint: beef stew, a stirfry with beef and cabbage, lots of cookies, two loaves of bread, and a pot of oatmeal. That should make our routines smoother for the rest of the week, giving us time to help J- with her homework.

I also worked on the bugs people have started identifying in Quantified Awesome. =) Sometimes the bugs are embarrassing, but I decided to squish my excuses and let people try things anyway. It’s fun tailoring systems to people again. I remember maintaining Planner Mode for a lively community of Emacs geeks, and I loved making all these little tweaks to help them live and work more awesomely. That was fun. It would be great to do something like that again.

From last week’s plans

Work
- [X] Set up external environment for project C
- [X] Finish styling project C
- [X] Talk to second-line manager and other coworkers regarding plans
- [X] Talk to lots of people about transition

Relationships
- [X] Get together with Gabriel and other friends

Life
- [-] E-mail potential users about time tracking analysis
- [-] Apply things learned from Quantified Self Toronto: Epic Quest of Awesome, time analysis
- [X] Research tips for starting a business in Toronto
- Researched incorporation options in Ontario
- Fixed more Quantified Awesome bugs
  - Monthly view of time summary should now be displayed whenever you try to summarize a range longer than a few weeks (fixed missing file)
  - People should now be able to create accounts through Google (fixed user creation issue)
  - Clothing logs and analyses can now be viewed (fixed permission issue)
  - Added end timestamp and manual timestamp field to time records
- Read lots of information about starting a small business

Plans for next week

Work
- [ ] Discuss project T transition
- [ ] Work on project C styling
- [ ] Plan farewell lunch

Relationships
- [X] Visit the Villanuevas
- [ ] Help with J’s homework

Life
- [ ] Look into switching to WIND and porting my number in order to take advantage of their data plan
- [ ] Collect referrals for accountants who focus on small businesses
- [ ] Figure out way to track and highlight exceptions thrown by Quantified Awesome

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Sacha Chua: High school application season

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

J- is working on her application for Western Tech’s ?CyberArts specialized high school program. She’s been organizing her portfolio and revising her application answers. It’s fun watching her application take shape. We help out from time to time with editing tips. At the end of the day, though, it has to be her words, her passion, and and her commitment.

In the beginning, she seemed frustrated. It can be difficult to explain why you want to learn something or what qualities you bring to a program. The first draft took a while. Then she filled it in with more detail, becoming more specific about her reasons. As she put her application together, you could almost see her becoming more and more confident. We helped her remember some of her other accomplishments, and she worked those into her application. She put her portfolio items together, and it was easy to see how far she’d come.

W- has been stellar. He’s been helping her sort through the sometimes intimidating array of requirements and possibilities. My contributions: In addition to the occasional nudge to replace commas with periods and to tweak wording slightly, I also enjoy reading her answers out to her. IA voice-over of sorts, so that she can hear it with confidence. “It sounds so good,” she says, and she knows it’s her words.

We remind her that it’s perfectly okay to not go for this program, and that it may involve a lot of work down the line. That said – drawing, photography, modeling, animation… It fits her interests well.

I think she’s close to the finishing line, past the humps of “Am I good enough for this?” and “Is this the right fit for me?” It will be interesting to see what happens next.

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Sacha Chua: Fourteen kids and an impromptu pie party

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:07:15 -0500

“Fourteen?!” my husband exclaimed. I looked up. He was talking to J-, who had apparently called from school asking if she could bring her friends over for pie. Fourteen teenagers in total. Two pies. After some hemming and hawing, he agreed, figuring that it was better to have them over than for them to have pie on some street corner.

We scrambled to get things ready. This meant ditching the comfortable bathrobes and breaking out the stack of saucers that I’d accumulated for my tea parties. As the kids tromped closer, W- directed them to the backyard. Although it was cold and the deck was wet, it wasn’t chilly, and there simply was not enough space in the living room to accommodate fourteen sugar-high bundles of energy. So the deck it would have to be.

W- brought the portable workbench out. We put the saucers and forks on the workbench, entrusted the pie server to J-, and stood back as the kids divided the apple pie and the pumpkin pie among themselves. They were apparently celebrating a fundraising milestone: their club had raised $100 for Free the Children. They had been planning the pie party for a month, but had forgotten to figure out where this pie party was going to take place. Fortunately, W- and I were at home and could give permission.

After the pie, the kids brought out their packed lunches. They shared their snacks with each other. Chocolate was the object of much envy, seaweed the currency of cool. They congratulated themselves on their fundraising, and circled around to repeat their oath. (It started with “I like kitties, and turtles too.”) They planned more celebrations for their next fundraising milestones.

It was much less chaotic than one might have expected. The kids tidied up before heading back to school, giving us the saucers and forks with thanks and apologies, and putting other garbage into a large bowl. It was fun hosting everyone, even.

Things that worked well:

Having lots of saucers and forks, thanks to my tea parties
Being around in the day for J- and her friends

Things that would make this even better:

More notice!
A group shot?

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tychoish.com essays: Retrospectives in 2011 Work Spacetime

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

For the most part, I'm quite happy with everything that I was able to accomplish last year. I've moved cities (for the second year in a row) and last year I changed jobs twice: in both cases, I think the current will stick for a while. And I'm working on other projects, with some impressive speed. Last year wasn't been great for finishing things, but I guess there's room for improvement this year.

After a fair amount of professional angst I'm finally doing pretty much exactly what I want to be doing: I'm writing a substantial/total revision of a software manual for a company developing an open source database system. I'll leave you to figure out the details, but it's great.

A couple years ago, I said to myself, that I wanted to be a "real technical writer," which is to say, work with engineering teams, write documentation and tutorials for a single product or group of products, and operate on a regular release schedule. I've done a great deal of writing for technology companies: from project proposals and journalism, to tutorials and content for distributors, to white papers, marketing, and sales materials. Delightfully, I've managed to get there, and in retrospect it's both somewhat amazing, and incredibly delightful.

A while back, I had dinner with a friend who's been doing the same thing I do for a long time (we know each other through folk dance and singing,) and by comparing our experiences it was great to learn that my experience is quite typical, both in terms of the work I'm doing and the procedural engineering practice frustrations (e.g. "What do you mean you changed the interface without telling me?!?!")

At work we have this thing where we send in an account of what we did during the day so that other people know what we're working on, and so that we can keep our team on the same page. After all, when you're all looking at computer screens all day, and in a few different time zones, it's easy to loose track of what people are working on.

At the bottom of these emails, we're prompted to ask "what are your blockers and impediments." Often I say something clever like "Compiler issue with Spacetime interface or Library." Or something to that effect. It feels like a good description of the last year.

Onward and Upward!

Sacha Chua: Setting things in motion

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:30:00 -0500

The more people I talk to about my plans for leaving IBM and experimenting with business, the more real the idea becomes. The more excited and confident I get about it, too, which is a good sign.

Today I sent my formal resignation e-mail, the one that kicks off all the associated HR processes. I named February 17 as my date: four years, four months, and two days after I joined IBM.

I expect to feel more nostalgia as the date approaches, and perhaps uncertainty. That’s all normal, which is why I’m brainstorming and writing down my reasons. The notes will come in handy if I hit a slump. It looks like all systems are go, though. It’s clearly a good idea for me at this point in time.

I’ve found people to take over all of my extracurricular interests. I’ve been braindumping enough throughout my time at IBM to not worry as much about transitions. I’ve always worked on things with the lottery/bus factor in mind: would the project be endangered if I won the lottery or got hit by a bus? (The lottery is highly unlikely, since I don’t buy tickets; I usually look both ways when crossing the street, but one never knows what could happen in the streets of Toronto.) I’ve written lots of notes and shared as much as I could as publicly as I could, and now it’s easy to link things together in a knowledge map on a wiki page that people can even update after I’m gone.

My manager told me of ways back in, and contracting companies that IBM is used to working with. It might be an option. I’d like to spend some time up front seeing if I can develop a business. Freelancing sounds like a reliable alternative, but it’s similar enough to what I currently do at IBM that I think I would learn lots more from trying to build a proper sustainable business with compounding value.

One step at a time. The project that I’m working on looks decent in IE8, IE9, Firefox, and Safari, and it looks a heck of a lot better than it did when I took it over. I’m on track to wrap that up well. Then there’s some HR paperwork to take care of, and more braindumping of memories and thoughts before they fade into fuzziness. Then the transition! Then slowly easing into experiments and feedback cycles and little bets…

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Sacha Chua: Getting ready for my next experiment!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:53:59 -0500

It’s been four years of awesomeness at IBM. I’ve:

helped companies and communities collaborate
facilitated brainstorming workshops with executives from leading companies
built web apps in Drupal and Ruby on Rails
created popular tools for community newsletters and analyses
drawn comics that made people smile across IBM, and
learned from and shared with people around the world.

It totally rocked. Thank you!

Mid-February 2012, I’ll be on to my next experiment. I want to help people save time and make better decisions. Let’s see how we can make that a sustainable business!

I’m looking forward to learning more about business, and sharing the adventure with you. =)

Stay in touch!

Stay tuned!

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Smarterware: One Year at My Standing Desk

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:30:15 -0500

Last January I took apart my computer desk and rebuilt it at standing height. I've been standing at my desk every workday since. Just in my 2011 travels, I've seen standing desks everywhere from the offices of San Francisco startups to the White House.

Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life hacks meme to eyeroll-inducing sign of a certain type of tightly-wound techie, similar to emptying your email inbox. Several people have asked me if I'm still standing. The answer is yes. Here's what I've learned from 365 days of being a professional stander.

Sitting is essential

My typical workday starts around 8 or 9am and wraps around 5 or 6pm. I don't stand the entire time. I stand all morning till lunchtime, and then stand again for a couple of hours after lunch. By 3 or 4pm, fatigue sets in, and my feet need a break. That's when I sit down at a small table I set up in my office or, if I want to put my feet up, push back in an old recliner I commandeered. I also sit at lunch, often sit during conference calls and TWiG, and sit to do paperwork or work on my iPad.

The point is: a standing desk doesn't mean you're standing for 8 hours a day straight. That's just not healthy. For me, standing a few hours a day has had its benefits and drawbacks.

The upsides of a standing desk

My back feels great. My posture is better than ever. My default work position is standing on flat feet, with my shoulders back, and my back slightly arched. I have a makeshift foot rest (a box of unsold books), and I often shift from one foot to another when my knees feel stiff. I lost 3-5 pounds in the first couple of weeks from standing alone. I'm way more active throughout the day, pacing, dancing, fidgeting. Because I'm used to standing all day at work, standing in line anywhere for long periods of time on weekends doesn't bother me in the least.

Thanks to my standing desk, I began naturally splitting activities up into active work (while standing) and passive work (while sitting). Since my legs and brain are fresh in the morning, I start my day by diving into the most effort-intensive work first, like coding and writing. By the afternoon I'm fatigued and ready to sit, so I use that time to process email, read Instapaper, catch up on Twitter and Facebook. Explicitly shifting gears like that helps my brain tackle the right kind of work given my physical and mental capacity at the moment.

The downsides of a standing desk

Ever since I got used to standing all day, sitting for long periods of time became uncomfortable for me. By the end of cross-country flights and even long movies, my back and backside feel stiff and achy. In the past 12 months I developed a silver dollar-sized case of spider veins on my right calf, just below my knee joint. It's not sexy. These are common for women my age, and both my parents had them, so it's difficult to say if I would have gotten these without the standing desk. Excessive standing (and sitting) are both known causes of spider veins.

The fatigue of a standing workday makes getting to the gym at the end of the day more difficult for me. When I was sitting all day, I'd feel so sluggish and sedentary I'd look forward to getting sweaty and exerting myself at the gym. At the end of a standing workday, you just want to sit down. For me, the gym has to happen in the morning, or it doesn't happen at all. While my daily calorie burn is definitely higher at the standing desk compared to sitting, standing at your desk is not a replacement for a good workout at the gym.

Finally, I work at home, alone in a room. Several people have told me that they don't want to be at the one standing desk in a sea of sitters at their office. I understand that. I'm not sure I'd pull this off in an office where I was surrounded by sitting co-workers and didn't have the luxury of two desks, one sitting, one standing.

That all said, once I got past the first couple of weeks, I haven't once considered switching back to a sitting desk full-time. Honestly, I barely give it a thought at all anymore. If you're considering it, here's how and why I switched to a standing desk.

Sacha Chua: Thinking about Quantified Awesome, meetups, and DemoCamp

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

So I’ve taken to calling my personal dashboard Quantified Awesome, and I even have the domain name for it. The name is fun, and it reminds me that this is data tracking for a reason: to live an even more awesome life. Right now, I use it for time, clothes, library books, fruits and vegetables, stuff, and measurements. I’ll add more as ideas come to me, and as I use the tools, I’ll flesh out the interface.

Quantified Self Toronto meetups have been fantastic for getting more ideas and for sharing what I’m working on with other people. I think this kind of tracking would be the kind of geeky thing that might be interesting for the DemoCamp Toronto crowd, too.

DemoCamp demos tend to be mostly startups, and I’m not at the point of turning this into a business yet. I remember they had lots of fun with my Livin’ la Vida Emacs talk, though, and I’d like to inspire people to apply their skills – programming, designing, whatever – to their own lives. I’d also love to connect with other people so that I can be inspired by their examples. People who are into this sort of thing in Toronto are probably already part of Quantified Self Toronto, though, so there may not be that much extra value in presenting something mainly for connection purposes. If I’m going to focus on either inspiring or collecting feedback, then, I want to make sure that people’s activation costs are low.

So, what would it take to get this to the point where I can create a lot of value in 10 minutes of demo and five minutes of Q&A? (Or if this is anything like my other talk, a short demo derailed by people anticipating jokes, turned into a general truth-is-funnier-than-fiction thing. =) )

I’d probably want to have lots of data driving lots of visualizations, because they’re easier to see on a big projected screen. If I build this up over a few months, I’ll have the data to let me ask interesting questions and report on behavioural changes, which will be really useful. I may want to shift from using RaphaelJS to using Protovis or a similar library for visualizations so that I can take advantage of the source code examples for a wide range of charts.

Another key thing would be to either allow other users or share the source code (maybe both! less hassle for helping people get started). That way, it’s not just about “Hey, this is cool! But you can’t use it unless you build your own.”

Opening this up to people will probably mean splitting my project time into development and support. It’s a trade-off: would the increased feedback be worth the support load? Depending on people and expectations (here there be bugs!), it might be okay. It might be a good idea to slow down and apply the same discipline we’re adopting on our work projects, too: test, test, test. I think it might be worth gradually opening this up over the next few months, with an eye towards demonstrating it at ?DemoCamp when I think it’ll help lots of people get started. It’s also highly likely that there’ll be a second Quantified Self conference, so that might be something good to plan for as well.

There are plenty of companies focused on making money by helping people track their life (health, mostly). Me, I want to be able to ask questions about life and figure out how to answer them, I want to inspire other people to try doing that too, and I eventually want to help build tools to make it easier for people to do so. Besides, it’s a great way to practice my development skills without giving in to the temptation to spend all that time on work instead. =)

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Sacha Chua: January 22, 2012

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:05:56 -0500

Most of this weekend was taken up by schoolwork. J- had a large Math project to work on – cereal box design (volume, surface area, ratios, etc.) and a writing assignment. She also needed to work on her application for the ?CyberArts high school program.

I don’t know how other families handle it. W- has been tutoring J- through the tough parts, and that takes time.

As for me, I followed up on the events I attended last week. I’ve also been working on Project C. Spotted a few things I missed last runthrough. Sometimes it feels like three steps forward, one step back. But that’s okay.

Also, I made spaghetti and meatballs for the first time!

(Helped J- learn Inkscape, too. Yay!)

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Sacha Chua: Weekly review: Week ending January 20, 2012

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:53:02 -0500

Big week! Several intense days and late nights, but still lots of progress.

Plans for next week

Work
- [X] Finish functionality-related tasks for project C
- [X] Work on styling for project C
- Decided what I want to do in 2012
- Told my manager and my project manager about my plans for experimenting with business

Relationships
- [X] Go to Rails Pub Nite
- [X] Go to Quantified Self Toronto meetup
- [X] Go to IBM get-together
- Followed up with people after Rails Pub Nite and Quantified Self Toronto meetup
- Helped J- learn Inkscape for her math / media studies project

Life
- [-] Quantified: Open up time tracking to folks
- [X] Quantified: Set up bug tracker
- Brainstormed business ideas
- Typed up my notes from “Start With Why” and “Lean Startup”

Plans for next week

Work
- [ ] Set up external environment for project C
- [ ] Finish styling project C
- [ ] Talk to second-line manager and other coworkers regarding plans
- [ ] Talk to lots of people about transition

Relationships
- [ ] Get together with Gabriel and other friends

Life
- [ ] E-mail potential users about time tracking analysis
- [ ] Apply things learned from Quantified Self Toronto: Epic Quest of Awesome, time analysis
- [ ] Research tips for starting a business in Toronto

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Smarterware: The Week We Stopped SOPA

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:00:14 -0500

Anil sums up the history and future of web protest as we wrap up the week we stopped SOPA. I had chills on Wednesday, the day the web went black in protest of SOPA, because we were all witnessing—and more importantly, participating in—history in the making. I'm so very glad to be alive during these exciting times.

The Byte Baker: Software Tailors

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

I came upon an article a few days ago relating software developers to tailors. The author (Patrick Rhone) wishes to have software tailors: people who will customize (or custom-make) software for you, for a price. It’s an interesting idea and not without its practical merits. In particular, given how most software today is “mass-produced” and customization options are in general, limited at best, a cottage industry of software-tailors might not be a bad idea. But for all its merits I think the idea is somewhat short-sighted. Software is sufficiently different from physical goods (including clothes) that applying the same concepts and processes to software and clothes is fundamentally flawed.

Operationally, software is much easier to change than physical matter. There’s no physical matter to change and if you make a mistake you can revert and go back to what you had. Undo is your friend. That means that even new programmers can create things of values, make mistakes and learn quickly by doing. However, conceptually, making software is as hard, if not harder than manipulating physical objects. I’m not a tailor, but I would wager that hacking on a complex piece of software requires as much skill as making alteration to a jacket. In fact, understanding million-line codebases might well be harder than tailoring a suit to custom dimensions.

The second flaw in the software tailor argument is that our software needs are far more varied than our clothing needs. Humans all have the same general body plans, you only need a handful of numbers to make a shirt fit. But our software requirements are far more varied. The text editing requirements for a novelist are different than that of a blogger which in turn are different from that of a programmer. To really understand what each person needs the programmer needs to have a pretty thorough understanding of what the problem domain is. This in turn means that the programmer either needs to be using that specalized software on a regular basis or the customer needs to able to communicate very clearly what they want. As anyone who’s written software for clients knows, getting proper requirements is often the hardest part of the project. This is why the best software is often “dogfooded” – the developers have been using what they’ve been developing. Furthermore making changes to any part of a codebase often requires understanding more than just the component you’re changing. What might be “just a few changes” to Mr. Rhone would probably end up be hours of diving into foreign source code (or at least learning an API). Writing good software is hard, writing good custom software is harder still. I don’t want to dismiss the idea of software tailors out of hand, but I want to make it clear that the job would not be like the analogy that Mr. Rhone provides.

If we can’t have neighbourhood software tailors, then what can we have? Customized software is good, because as I’ve said, people have very varied software needs that standardized software often falls short of accomodating. What I think we need is twofold: a technological shift where developers write extensible software by default and a cultural shift by which users are no longer afraid to modify their own software. Programmers (especially open source developers) are used to modifying and extending their own tools, I want to see common software users modifying their word processors and email filters.

But, but, but, does this mean we should make our own clothes and do the servicing on our cars ourselves? No, of course not. Like I said, the tailor (and the mechanic) analogy is not the right one. A better analogy is cooking. You can eat your meals at restaurants and fast food places (use standard consumer software) or you can cook your own. If you can spend an hour or two a day putting together ingredients in exact proportions and heating them at specific temperatures for specific times, you can spend half an hour a day typing some some code to make your software work the way you want it to.

Now this cultural shift is only possible if the software supports it and right now most of our software doesn’t. But that can change. Text editors like Emacs and shells like Bash and Zsh are meant to be customized and its not hard to do so once someone shows you how. Browsers are also customizable, though not quite as easily. Luckily software is malleable and with more and more people being software literate I think this is a feasible change in the not-too-distant future. Mr. Rhone wants a shift to developers making it easier for software to be extended, but those some changes could just as easily make it easier for users to adapt their software.

So with all due respect to Mr. Rhone, I don’t want a culture of software tailors. That’s not any different from the programmer-priesthood we have today. Unlike our clothes, our computers are incredibly powerful machines and we’re increasingly dependent on them in both general and very specific ways. I want a culture of citizen hackers: a generation of people who can mix and match their software just as we can develop our own dressing or cooking styles.

As programmers, our job isn’t to write code or be better craftsmen. It’s to solve problems, everything else is tangential. I believe the best way to do that is by empowering users to better solve their own problems. We fight for the users so that they can fight for themselves.

Sacha Chua: Quantified Self Toronto #9

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:05:38 -0500

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Sacha Chua: Emacs: Telling external processes about terminal capabilities, and watching over other people’s shoulders

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:06:03 -0500

Justin Giancola (@elucid) wanted to use full-ack.el to search through his project files using the Ack tool, but Ack refused to run because it didn’t think his terminal had enough capabilities. A simple fix was to set the TERM variable with

(setenv "TERM" "xterm")

which told Ack that Emacs was fine with its output.

(Speaking of Ack integration – This being the Emacs world, there’s more than one way to do things. You might also want to check out ack-and-a-half.el, which is midway between ack.el and full-ack.el.)

It was interesting hanging out with someone else who used Emacs, and being able to share tips. I don’t run into many other Emacs geeks, but I sporadically hang out in the #emacs channel or browse Planet Emacsen to be inspired. It’s funny how many of the meetups I go to end up involving Emacs conversations. It’s like I have a big M-x banner hovering over my head. =) It’s awesome, actually!

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Sacha Chua: Brainstorming breakdowns, assumptions, and possibilities

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:31:20 -0500

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The Byte Baker: My Brain on Information

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

I’ve read two things recently that have made me think about and reconsider the role of information in our lives and particularly the way in which I consume and process it. We live in an information-dense era of human history. In the western world (and increasingly, the world in general) the tools to access, consume, produce and distribute vasts amounts of information are available to almost everyone at just a moments’ notice. In many ways, we are living in a Golden Age of Information. The problem is, this Golden Age first crept up on us stealthily and then rammed into us headlong at full speed. As a result I think most of us, even those considered “digital natives” (myself included), seem to be perpetually ill-equipped to deal with both the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly information-rich existence.

Last week I read Accelerando, a set of short stories by British science fiction author Charlie Stross. The stories start from the near future (almost the present) and extend to a distant post-Singularity future where humanity lives among the stars, but in the shadows of godlike intellects. Though the entire collection is worth reading (and available for free), the first few stories about a world not too different from our own were particularly interesting. At one point one of the main characters, a very intelligent serial entrepreneur (and “venture altruist”) name Manfred Macx claims to consume a megabyte of text and several gigabytes of multimedia a day just to keep current.

That’s a lot of information for any person to consume in a day – a megabyte is roughly half a million English words. Though this is science fiction, I think we’re quickly getting to the point where people who want to stay current with the pace of science and technology will be required to consume enormous amounts of information regularly. Half a million words a day may be too much for an unaugmented human (Macx has an array of cybernetic implants and software agents forming a “exocortex” for information processing) but I think tens of thousands of words a day will soon become par for the course. And that’s just text. I’m not including understanding diagrams, source code, operations manuals or even video or audio. If we’re supposed to be assimilating such huge quantities of information on a regular basis how are we supposed to make sense of it all?

That brings me to a piece on The Atlantic website dramatically titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“. It’s about how the use of search engines and similar fast information retrieval systems is supposedly rewiring our brains. While some parts of the piece are overly sentimental and melodramatic, the core point is sound: the tools we have access to and the way we use them plays a role in shaping the functionality of our brains. I also sympathize that a habit of continually sampling little bites of information can be deeply unsatisfying. It’s easy to get hooked on to a Facebook or Twitter stream but as you stay hooked you can feel your brainpower wither as you lose the ability to concentrate longer than 140 characters. When I get stuck on Hacker News or Reddit for hours I feel terrible by the end of the day. Though I love good stories and movies it’s easy to get hooked on Netflix, passively consuming information but not really doing anything. But I’d like to believe that we can train our brains to be not quite so helpless in the face of endless streams of juicy tidbits.

A growing body of research is showing that the human brain is an incredibly flexible organ. Neuroplasticity is the norm, not the exception. As the amount of information we need to process increases (and our tools to do so get better) our brains change to accomodate it all. That of course begs the question: how far can we push ourselves? Can we train our brains to not just flit from hyperlink to hyperlink but actually digest and understand large amounts of interconnected material with greater efficiency and accuracy? Can we ensure that Google makes us smarter and wiser, not stupider?

Though our reading habits (and by extension our general thought patterns) might be changing, the change is not accidental nor is it inevitable. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the slow reading habits of yesteryear I think we should be trying to embrace the information-dense world around us. In particular, we need to stop thinking of deep reading and skimming as antagonistic to each other. Perhaps what we need to do is not to read slower, but rather separate the physical act of reading from the mental act of comprehending what we have read. I would love to be able to read text fast, look up links and references and then let the mass of information “ferment” in my brain. I’d like to be able to train my brain to think of what I’ve read after I’m done looking at the text forming connection betweens concepts and ideas while I’m walking down the street or taking a shower.

Perhaps this is an exceedingly computer-science centric way of thinking about the brain and thought processes. To be honest, I’ve been writing code and processing data algorithmically far longer than I’ve been learning about how the brain works. I do tend to think of the brain primarily as an information processor. Unlike the author of The Atlantic article I’m not nearly as attached to the so-called “human” aspect of my intelligence (but that’s a matter for another blog post). I like settling down with a cup of coffee and a good book in a nice armchair as much as the next guy, but only on the weekends. During the week I’d like to come up with six impossible things before breakfast and figure out how to make them possible through the course of the day. To do that I need to keep the information machine fed, creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’d love to know how to do that better.

Sacha Chua: January 15, 2012

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:36:07 -0500

This weekend brought a cold snap, or maybe this is regular winter in contrast to the mild days earlier. We dealt with it by cooking and baking our way through many of the vegetables that had come from the community-supported agriculture program, stockpiling frozen lunches for the weeks to come. It was a productive weekend.

I spent most of the weekend working on Quantified Awesome. I’m looking forward to opening it up to people next week. It’s still rough in places, but people will probably be able to use it for tracking time, stuff, and clothes. I have a few more things to nail down before I reach out to the 35 people who’ve indicated their interest so far, but I feel like I’m getting close.

I hit my library checkout limit of 50 books the other day, what with all the books I’ve been checking out on psychology, planning, and other things I’m curious about. W- let me check things out on his card. There’s been a steady stream of books and movies going back to the library, and no late fines so far. I’ve been making an effort to read things roughly in order of due date. I sometimes give in to the temptation to read things out of order. (Like The Lean Startup, read the day I picked it up and quoted soon after.) The Toronto Public Library is amazing, and I’m happy to support it.

My time-tracking tweaks seem to be working out. David Ing wondered if I was getting limited by reductive analysis. I rather like the clarity of choosing one activity at a time. I’m satisfied with tweaking my goals to encompass the sustainability of growth at work, too.

This week: more functionality/theming changes at work, and three events to attend. Let’s see how it goes!

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Sacha Chua: Weekly review: Week ending January 13, 2012

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:30:00 -0500

From last week’s plans

Work
- [X] Work on more functionality for project C
- [X] Check end date for project C, next gig
- [X] Check out U – pretty cool
- [-] Draw more IBM comics?
- Fixed Lotus Connections community toolkit forum support

Relationships
- [-] Tidy up downstairs
- [X] Spend time with Ninong Gus and Ninang Amparo

Life
- [\] Open up Quantified Awesome to at least one other person – Still working on cleaning it up. Maybe I should just bring people in and see what breaks.
- Quantified Awesome: Added graphical goal feedback
- Quantified Awesome: Started cleaning up registration
- Settled into more memory on website

Plans for next week

Work
- [ ] Finish functionality-related tasks for project C
- [ ] Work on styling for project C

Relationships
- [ ] Go to Rails Pub Nite
- [ ] Go to Quantified Self Toronto meetup
- [ ] Go to IBM get-together

Life
- [ ] Quantified: Open up time tracking to folks
- [X] Quantified: Set up bug tracker

Time analysis


Work	Good	40:57 hours this week
Sleep	Good	61:05 hours, average of 8:43
Personal/social discretionary	Good	23:05 social to 17:44 personal
Work/discretionary balance	Good	40:57 work, 40:49 discretionary

Pretty good, actually! It was a little tight in the beginning, because I used last weekend to get some work done instead of tinkering with Quantified Awesome or focusing on chores. I used the time on Friday to focus on building and planning, and that was time well-spent.

Next week, I’m attending a couple of events, so I have less evening hacking time. I’m looking forward to being inspired by the events, and to more hacking and planning.

Life is good.

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Sacha Chua: January 13, 2012

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:30:00 -0500

It snowed today. Both W- and I worked from home. We closed the blinds and lowered the shades so that I wouldn’t have to look at the snow falling. I’m still in the stage of preferring winter to be abstract; savoured as baking season in a warm kitchen instead of seen – or experienced – as flurries and blizzards.

After the snow and wind subsided, we walked to the supermarket to pick up some supplies. Snow has a way of making everything farther, but good company makes a good walk.

I had shifted plenty of work time to the previous weekend in order to try something new this week. I felt stretched a little bit, but I think it paid off. I collected more data to help me make decisions.

I had more time today to focus on Quantified Awesome, too. I’m working on opening the site up to registrations. Yes, still that. I have a development environment up on the server so that I can work on it even when I’m away from home. After I build a tutorial, I think it will be ready for a couple of users.

I fixed some issues with the Lotus Connections community toolkit I’d created at work. It’s good to get that sorted out.

We held our first study group session for this year, reviewing areas, circumferences, and volumes. The kids asked for help with their other subjects, too. Writing: the five-paragraph structure. Drama: Romeo and Juliet.

After they departed, W- and I got ready for a cooking sprint. We watched Rashomon while having dinner. After I finished my beef bulgogi, I settled in and scrubbed more potatoes. The fingerling potatoes we received from the community-supported agriculture program had been crusty with dirt that was hard to dislodge. Half of the potatoes were relatively clean, thanks to last night’s movie-accompanied scrubbing. I worked my way through the rest of the potatoes as Akira Kurosawa’s classic story unfolded. Scrubbing kept my hands busy and didn’t demand too much attention away from the subtitles. When the potatoes were done, we roasted them along with the beets and the two chickens that W- had marinated in pandan mix. Yum.

A snow day, but not really a quiet one.

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Smarterware: The Flip Side of a Big Audience

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:02:12 -0500

"Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards." —Danny O'Brien

Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world knowing you're "internet famous." Yes, being famous among dozens has its privileges, but it also has a flip side netizens rarely discuss.

I passed 200,000 followers on Twitter this week. I'm not a celebrity. I've written books and made apps, but I've never been on primetime TV and I wasn't on Twitter's suggested user list during its heyday. I am an early adopter, a dedicated self-promoter, a daily user, and a leader in two large internet communities. All these things translated into an outsized follower count on both Twitter and Google+. Nowadays, when someone notices my follower count—and many people do, because it's a status symbol which indicates which echelon of web society you belong to—they get wide-eyed. "Wow, you're famous," they say.

Reality check: Lady Gaga is famous. Bloggers are not famous.

I'm not famous, but I have an outsized audience. I can ask a question and get hundreds of replies, reshares, and favorites in a matter of hours. If I want a lot of people to see something, I can make that happen in a few keystrokes without any help from a PR firm or media outlet. I've mentioned my follower counts and blog stats in book deal and paycheck negotiations, because people who hire me are often buying my ability to market my book or project.

But you know what else happens when you have an outsized audience?

You field a weekly flood of pitches.

Having a big audience means you're a commodity, and you get to constantly field pitches from strangers, acquaintances, former co-workers, and distant family members who you never hear from otherwise asking you to mention their new app, book, Kickstarter project, or ?MySpace page. People decide how important you are by your Klout score and treat you accordingly. Ad agencies look up how much your tweets are worth and recruit you to tweet on behalf of their clients for money. It's a bizarre and sometimes awkward crash course in saying "sorry, no" to the requests that just don't feel right (and most of them don't).

People who don't know you make wildly inaccurate assumptions about things you say.

If you crack a joke, use sarcasm, or don't fully explain your 140-character statement, you will be misunderstood, because most of your followers barely know you. Last week I said I have mixed feelings about lesbian contestants in a beauty pageant. A handful of people tried to explain why lesbians are just as worthy of beauty pageants as heterosexual women. Having to explain stinks.

You forget how to share with people who do know you.

To avoid misunderstandings, you start dumbing down your posts and only writing things which are literal and mostly non-controversial. (At least I do.) But that means your friends don't enjoy the connection that comes with hearing you be you, instead of edited-you. In an attempt to fix this problem, I set my Facebook user profile to friends-only access. But by now I'm so ruined by my addiction to the flood of retweets, favorites, and replies I get from public posts to my big audience, I spend less time sharing privately.

You get addicted to the approval of strangers.

The addiction to the attention you get from a crowd of strangers turns you into a performer instead of a sharer. You look for cheap laughs, stars, retweets, and replies, instead of meaningful conversation with people you actually care about.

Your view of the world gets skewed.

An outsized audience presents problems like the ones listed here that no one else has. When you have a big audience, you're the 1% of the web, and that means your view of the world is skewed. You get paranoid about privacy, cynical about requests from friends, and impatient about misunderstandings. I spent two years building an app that helps people organize and archive hundreds of tweet replies, solving a problem that basically no one else has.

You're a spam magnet and a troll target.

Like mosquitoes to a lightbulb at night, high visibility attracts spammers. Seven percent of the comments I receive on a given post on Google+ can be spam. Seven percent! Not to mention the daily trolling, harassment, and for women, weekly messages from men who feel the need to share their opinion on your physical appearance.

At this point you're wondering, If having a big audience is so bad, why not just shut down your accounts and start fresh under an unknown pseudonym? On more than one occasion, I've considered burning it all down and going back to using these tools for their intended purpose: as a way to keep up with friends.

But ultimately the advantages of an outsized audience outweigh the crappy parts for me. Even when I have a job that pays a salary, I work with a freelancer's mind-set. Employers, projects, and clients will come and go, but I've created an online network under my own name that's helped me a lot more than it's hindered me.

Still, when someone tells me they want more Twitter followers and a highly-trafficked blog and the ability to reach so many people so easily, I usually say, "Be careful what you wish for."

The Byte Baker: Screenplays for the Web

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:00:00 -0500

Yesterday I sat down to put some of my old screenplays online. Screenplays have a very specific format – monospaced fonts, fixed directions for margins, etc. Unfortunately all those rules are for paper and if there’s one thing I really don’t plan on doing, it’s distributing my writing on dead trees. But I still wanted to put my work online and have it look like a screenplay.

When I was taking my creative writing class last semester I used ?LaTeX to output nicely formatted PDFs to submit and I wrote directly in ?LaTeX. Though PDFs are great for class submissions and printing I’m very much an HTML fanboy when it comes to publishing online. Unfortunately ?LaTeX doesn’t seem to export directly to HTML. That’s understandable, HTML still has a way to go before it supports all the beautiful typographic nuances that ?LaTeX is capable of. There are some ?LaTeX-to-HTML converters out there, but I couldn’t them to compile on my Macbook. Instead of trying to debug the compile process I threw some regexes at the existing ?LaTeX source and turned it into fairly semantic hypertext.

HTML is a flexible markup language, but there was some abuse of existing HTML elements involved in coming up with a structure that worked for screenplays. Each piece of dialog becomes a section tag and I’ve really abused the header and paragraph tags. If you can come up with a more semantically “correct” interpretation, I’d love to see it. Anyways, the translation went quickly and with some CSS the result isn’t bad, in my opinion. I converted one of my shorter pieces and put it on my website, if you care to take a look. The whole process took about half an hour including fiddling with regexes and CSS.

So much for taking a ?LaTeX screenplay and translating it to HTML. But what about writing a screenplay for the web first? By way of inspiration, Stories and Novels is a beautiful site that features complete stories and novels in a beautiful web format (as well as Kindle editions). I’d love to see something similar for screenplays. Now admittedly, people don’t usually read screenplays the same way they read novels or stories, but who’s to say that once the trend starts it won’t pick up (and it would be a interesting experiment regardless)?

Of course, writing HTML (or any form of XML) by hand is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. It’s ok when working on a design and layout but I’d rather not write entire screenplays (or stories or novels or even blog posts) in HTML by hand. Recently, lightweight markup languages such as Markdown and Textile have become popular. They’re designed to be easily converted to HTML and they feel natural to write in. Maybe we could come up with something similar for screenplays? Sounds like an interesting weekend project, I’ll let you know how it goes on Monday.

Sacha Chua: Work, extracurriculars, and measuring time: an epiphany

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:49:29 -0500

I remember now why I had stopped tracking time before. Breaking things down at the project level made me feel weird about my extracurricular interests at IBM, like the community toolkit and now the IBM comics. On one hand, I wanted to support our utilization goals and claim time as accurately as possible. On the other hand, I didn’t want to give up personal time, especially as I could use it to build more functionality into Quantified Awesome. I felt conflicted. I found myself slipping from the feeling of an abundance of time to the feeling of a scarcity of it, to be carefully portioned out among too many demands.

Today, brainstorming how to address my worst-case scenario considerations, I realized something: I’d been thinking about it the wrong way. It’s not extra time I’m donating or a hobby I might outgrow. It’s a live opportunity to test ideas with a massive, built-in internal market.

Comics on the intranet homepage? A fledgling artist couldn’t buy that kind of space. A community analysis tool that other people have come to rely on? Good practice in supporting disparate users and scaling up value.

No money might change hands, but a steady stream of thank-you notes helps my manager argue for a top rating, which often translates into a bonus.

So now I’ve got a couple of ways to rethink how this fits into my life.

I can promote these extracurriculars from the category “Work – Other” to “Discretionary – Other” or something similar, and budget myself four or five hours a week. It’s not work, it’s learning.

Alternatively, I can keep it under “Work – Other” and add an effective 10% overhead to my billable work. Many people have told me that I’m a fast developer, anyway, so scaling my output down to that of a somewhat above average developer will still mean that we do good stuff. The cognitive surplus goes into process improvement, self-development, and happiness, which is definitely worthwhile. I get stressed when I feel like I’m letting my other priorities slip, so spending time on them is important too.

These extracurricular interests can create a lot of value. I should adjust my measurements accordingly so that my measurements don’t lead to conflicting feelings.

How you measure affects how you manage.

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Smarterware: Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:00:20 -0500

If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like they're phishing attempts. Up until today, whenever I sent messages using my Google Apps account with the From: address set to my vanilla Gmail address, my Gmail-using recipients got an alarming, bright red message at the top which said "This message may not have been sent by [who it appears to be from]. Learn more Report phishing." Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

Senders: If messages from your Gmail address look like phishing

If you're sending email with the From: field set to your Gmail email address (that is, username@gmail.com or username@googlemail.com) from any client other than Gmail itself, use Gmail's SMTP servers to send the mail.

The process for setting your email software to use Gmail's SMTP server will vary depending on what email client you're using. If you're like me and using another Gmail or Google Apps account to send custom From: address Gmail, here's how to set the SMTP server.

In your primary Google Apps/Gmail account where you actually send messages from, in Settings > Accounts > Send mail as, click on "edit info" next to your custom Gmail From: address.

Double-check your name and email address listed there, and click on the "Next Step" button. On the "Send mail through your SMTP server?" step, don't use the default SMTP server. Instead, check the "Send through gmail.com SMTP servers" option, and enter your Gmail username and password for the account you want to send From.

If you're using Google's two-step verification for your Gmail account (and you should be), you'll need to generate an application-specific password for the SMTP server use. Click on the "Save Changes" and you're done. Your messages will no longer look like they are phishing attempts.

Senders: If messages from your Google Apps address look like phishing

If messages from your Google Apps domain name are getting the red phishing warning, you've got to tweak a DNS setting to fix it. In short, you've got to add a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record to your domain which verifies that Google Apps' mail servers are authorized to send your messages on your domain's behalf. The exact process for doing this depends on where you registered and administer your domain, but Google Apps Support runs down the general steps to create an SPF record for a domain:

1. Log in to the administrative console for your domain.

2. Locate the page from which you can update the DNS records. You may need to enable advanced settings.

3. Create a TXT record containing this text: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

4. Save your changes. Keep in mind that changes to DNS records may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet.

If it's not clear where or how to add an SPF record for your domain, get in touch with your domain registrar support to find out how.

Recipients: If your friends' messages look like phishing

Gmail's phishing alert on messages that look like they came from unauthorized SMTP servers helps recipients identify email scams, but it stinks for senders for using custom From: addresses legitimately, because they don't know it's happening. The only way I knew it was happening to my email is because Adam told me it was!

So, if you're getting this phishing alert on friends' or co-workers' messages that you know are legit, send them a link to this article or to Google's Support page on the subject. They'll appreciate it.

Why am I seeing the error "This message may not have been sent by...."? [Gmail Help]

Sacha Chua: Tip: Use visibility to motivate new habits

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

The urge to check things off can be a great way to start a new habit. On our recent trip to the Philippines, we found out that packing our vitamin supplements into pill organizers made it much easier to remember to take them daily. I get this compulsion to tick things off in order, to open each box on the right day, to see the chain of empty boxes grow.

It’s a well-known trick, this idea of making habits visible. Jerry Seinfeld says don’t break that chain, and that works wonders. It’s part anticipation and part loss aversion. People use it to pick up all sorts of habits. Mel Chua uses it to get the hang of flossing her teeth, for example. Visible progress is wonderful.

We’re back home now, but I’m going to keep using the pill organizers to keep track of supplements. Let’s see what else might benefit from this idea…

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Sacha Chua: Things I want to learn more about through work

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:10:43 -0500

Testing business assumptions: I like this definition from Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup”:

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

I’ve come to realize that the most important part of this definition is what it omits. It says nothing about the size of the company, industry, or the sector of the economy. Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, nonprofit, or decidedly for-profit company with financial investors.

I like the idea of treating work as an experiment that reduces uncertainty and helps us do something better. I want to get better at bringing out those uncertainties and planning how to resolve them.

Visualizing data and making better decisions: I like collecting data, bringing them together in dashboards, and figuring out visualizations that can help people make better decisions. Last year, I implemented a visualization for a Drupal project so that investors could see where the gaps in funding were. I’m working on some visualizations for my personal dashboard. I think it’s useful to be able to help people find patterns while avoiding false positives or visual noise.

Building systems that fit the way people need to work: I like the way we tailored the last project based on constant client feedback. I like saving people time by building systems that help them work more effectively instead of requiring a lot of repetitive work.

Hmmm…

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The Byte Baker: Looking ahead

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

It is now just about a third of the way through the first month of the year. I’m not really one for resolutions so I didn’t make any. In fact, I didn’t do anything by way of preparing for the start of a new year. However there is one thing that I’ve been wanting to do for years that I hope to finally get around to doing: concentrate more on my writing, in particular, paying more attention to this blog.

I’ve never really wanted to be a full-time blogger, not even a technology blogger. I’ve always preferred to be someone who wrote code (or at least studied writing code) and wrote about those experiences on the side. By and large, that’s been true. However the thing is that I really like writing. It’s a good break from coding and thinking about computer science research and I enjoy communicating directly with people instead of machines for a change (which is why I refuse to pander to search engines and write SEO-directed stuff). Anyways, despite my not being a very regular writer this blog has been moving along nicely. I get around 400 hits on an average weekday and that number has been going up steadily. I’ve been on Hacker News more than once and that’s always generated a good burst of traffic.

I’ve also been discovering technologists and scientist writing interesting and very useful blogs. These are people like danah boyd (Senior Researcher at Microsoft), Matt Might (CS Professor at the University of Utah) and Andrea Kuszewski (a researcher at the George Greenstein Institute). I admire their blogs and their writing but I also admire them for being dedicated scientists and researchers. These blogs reaffirm my belief that writing on a regular basis is important (and healthy) for everyone especially if you’re involved in research and development of new technologies.

All that is a way of saying that I would like to blog more. Looking over my archives for last year I’ve only made about one post a week. Ideally I would like to increase that to two or three a week, not including the Sunday Selection link posts (I doubt I could keep up quality for anything more than that). I also want to start tackling more technical subjects. I’ve been talking a lot about the intersection of technology and productivity for a while now, but I’m starting to get a tired of the productivity aspect. Long story short, I’ve found the small set of everyday tools and environments that I need to get work done. For the foreseeable future it’s more a question of being able to stick to habits and schedules than of using the right tools. When I do speak of tools I want to give concrete examples (like my post on showing Git information in your Bash prompt) rather than handwavey suggestions.

On a related note I’ve been considering moving off ?WordPress.com. ?WordPress is great if you’re using their web-based interface but is harder to use if you live in Emacs. I’m starting to itch for a writing system that integrates well with Emacs. I’d like to be able to include my own HTML, CSS and ?JavaScript in my posts and be able to customize things a bit more than ?WordPress.com allows. I haven’t given much thought to this matter, but I’m looking at alternate systems such as Jekyll and Octopress. Whatever I decide to do I’ll probably test it out at my personal website before doing anything over here.

While this blog is definitely my most serious writing project, it’s not the only one. I took a few creative writing classes in college and enjoyed them immensely. I would like to be able to continue writing fiction (and maybe even get in shape for ?NaNoWriMo 2012). But for I’ll be content with just regular blogging output. Glad to have you all along for the ride.

Sacha Chua: Making good progress on theming the site

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:27:43 -0500

The Drupal site I’m working on is slowly coming together. I still feel an itch to redo the big, hardcoded structures that a previous developer left behind, but I’m focusing on all the functional pieces first. Then I’ll do the styling and spacing tweaks, and then I’ll think of making that structure more flexible.

I like working with other people’s code, even if the code occasionally makes me go “Huh? What were they thinking?” It’s good to be able to work with other people’s structures and gradually immerse yourself in a project. Otherwise, you’d be limited to just the things you can build from scratch.

We’re still quite a bit away from having something that would be ready for launch, but we’re making progress. I don’t know if I’ll be on this project through launch, but it would be nice.

I like launches. =) I want to have more of them.

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Hacker Visions: NASA vs NOSA

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:19:23 -0500

Kudos to NASA for launching code.nasa.gov, where NASA will try to nurture some of the space-related open source projects in its, ahem, orbit.

In 2005, I was briefly involved in some efforts to create a code hub within NASA, but balked when I read the NASA Open Source Agreement and NASA appeared unable the modify it. The license is fatally flawed. Here’s what FSF says about it:

 The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free
 software license because it includes a provision requiring
 changes to be your "original creation". Free software development
 depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA
 license doesn't permit this.

 We urge you not to use this license. In addition, if you are a
 United States citizen, please write to NASA and call for the use
 of a truly free software license.

That’s quite the right position on this license, which is to say if you are choosing a license for your project, please don’t choose NOSA. You’re probably better off with something more permissive (i.e. something that can be turned into NOSA if needed).

NOSA is also not a general license, although my initial 2005 look at the world of NOSA-licensed code turned up a lot of stuff using it as such. If you are going to release a new project under NOSA and you are not a Government Agency, things can get murky. Best to avoid NOSA when you can.

The Byte Baker: Show Git information in your prompt

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:00:00 -0500

I’ve been a sworn fan of version control for a good few years now. After a brief flirtation with Subversion I am currently in a long term and very committed relationship with the Git version control system. I use Git to store all my code and writing and to keep everything in sync between my machines. Almost everything I do goes into a repository.

When I’m working I spend most of my time in three applications: a text editor (generally Emacs), a terminal (either iTerm2 or Gnome Terminal) and a browser (Firefox or Safari). When in Emacs I use the excellent Magit mode to keep track of the status of my current project repository. However my interaction with git is generally split between Emacs and the terminal. There’s no real pattern, just what’s easiest and open at the moment. Unfortunately when I’m in the terminal there’s no visible cue as to what the status of the repo is. I have to be careful to run git status regularly to see what’s going. I need to manually make sure that I’ve committed everything and pushed to the remote server. Though this isn’t usually a problem, every now and then I’ll forget to commit and push something on one of my machines, go to another and then realized I’ve left behind all my work. It’s annoying and kills productivity.

Over the last few days I decided to sit down and give my terminal a regular indicator of the state of the current repository. So without further ado, here’s how I altered my Bash prompt to show relevant Git information.

Extracting Git information

There are generally three things I’m concerned about when it comes the Git repo I’m currently working on:

What is the current branch I’m on?
Are there any changes that haven’t been committed?
Are there local commits that haven’t been pushed upstream?

Git provides a number of tools that gives you a lot of very detailed information about the state of the repo. Those tools are just a few commands away and I don’t want to be seeing everything there is to be seen at every step. I just want the minimum information to answer the above question.

Since the bash prompt is always visible (and updated after each command) I can put a small amount of text in the prompt to give me the information I want. In particular my prompt should show:

The name of the current branch
A “dirty” indicator if there are files that have been changed but not committed
The number of local commits that haven’t been pushed

What is the current branch?

The symbolic-ref command shows the branch that the given reference points to. Since HEAD is the symbolic reference for the current state of the working tree, we can use git symbolic-ref HEAD to get the full branch. If we were on the master branch we would get back something like refs/heads/master. We use a little Awk magic to get rid of everything but the part after the last /. Wrapping this into a litte function we get:


function git-branch-name
{
    echo $(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | awk -F/ {'print $NF'})
}

Has everything been committed?

Next we want to know if the branch is dirty, i.e. if there are uncommitted changes. The git status command gives us a detailed listing of the state of the repo. For our purposes is the very last line of the output. If there are no outstanding changes it says “nothing to commit (working directory clean)”. We can isolate the last line using the Unix tail utility and if it doesn’t match the above message we print a small asterisk (*). This is just enough to tell us that there is something we need to know about the repo and should run the full git status command.

Again, wrapping this all up into a little function we have:

function git-dirty {
    st=$(git status 2>/dev/null | tail -n 1)
    if [[ $st != "nothing to commit (working directory clean)" ]]
    then
        echo "*"
    fi
}

Have all commits been pushed?

Finally we want to know if all commits to the respective remote branch. We can use the git branch -v command to get a verbose listing of all the local branches. Since we already know the name of the branch we’re on, we use grep to isolate the line that tells us about our branch of interest. If we have local commits that haven’t been pushed the status line will say something like “[ahead X]“, where X is the number of commits not pushed. We want to get that number.

Since what we’re looking for is a very well-defined pattern I decided to use BASH’s built-in regular expressions. I provide a pattern that matches =”[ahead X]” where X is a number. The matching number is stored in the BASH_REMATCH array. I can then print the number or nothing if no such match is present in the status line. The function we get is this:

function git-unpushed {
    brinfo=$(git branch -v | grep git-branch-name)
    if [[ $brinfo =~ ("[ahead "([[:digit:]]*)]) ]]
    then
        echo "(${BASH_REMATCH[2]})"
    fi
}

The =~ is the BASH regex match operator and the pattern used follows it.

Assembling the prompt

All that’s left is to tie together the functions and have them show up in the BASH prompt. I used a little function to check if the current directory is actually part of a repo. If the =git status= command only returns an error and nothing else then I’m not in a git repo and the functions I made would only give nonsense results. This functions checks the =git status= and then calls the other functions or does nothing.

function gitify {
    status=$(git status 2>/dev/null | tail -n 1)
    if [[ $status == "" ]]
    then
        echo ""
    else
        echo $(git-branch-name)$(git-dirty)$(git-unpushed)
    fi
}

Finally we could put together prompt. BASH allows for some common system information to be displayed in the prompt. I like to see the current hostname (to know which machine I’m on if I’m working over SSH) and the path to the directory I’m in. That’s what the \h and the \w are for. The Git information comes after that (if there is any) followed by a >. I also like to make use of BASH’s color support.

function make-prompt
{
    local RED="\[033[0;31m\]"
    local GREEN="\[033[0;32m\]"
    local LIGHT_GRAY="\[033[0;37m\]"
    local CYAN="\[033[0;36m\]"

    PS1="${CYAN}\h\
${GREEN} \w\
${RED} \$(gitify)\
${GREEN} >\
${LIGHT_GRAY} "

}

Conclusion

I like this prompt because it gives me just enough information at a glance. I know where I am, if any changes have been made and how much I’ve diverged from the remote copy of my work. When I’m not in a Git repo the git information is gone. It’s clean simple and informative.

I’ve borrowed heavily from both Jon Maddox and Zach Holman for some of the functionality. I didn’t come across anyone showing the commit count, but I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of other people have it too. There are probably other ways to get the same effect, this is just what I’ve found and settled on. The whole setup is available as a gist so feel free to use or fork it.