Nimble Code: Category Silly

On Appearing In The Background Behind Two Pulitzer Winners

2008-04-08T07:45:00-07:00

Wow, this is just so unexpected… Where to begin…

Let me start by stating how amazed I am to be here. As a semipro quasi-journalist wannabe, I’ve been in awe of the Pulitzers for a long time. And while I have daydreamed many a tired morning of winning one, I never seriously believed I would find myself in this spot today: unwittingly standing in the background in a photograph of two Pulitzer winners.

I wish I could say it was skill: my uncanny knack for being sublimely oblivious to photographers focusing on their actual subjects a few feet in front on me. But I must admit that luck has played a far larger part in my current fortune than most other men might want to admit. If not for the chance proximity of me to these fine Pulitzer winners, my labor would be relegated to obscurity like so many other such pictures, scattered across the negatives and memory cards of so many tourists’ vacations.

Of course, fate may have delivered me to this moment, but once there my years of training guided to success. I refrained from blinking, I didn’t pick my nose, I subconsciously stood at the right place to hide the coffee stain on my jeans, all of which made a difference in the selection of this photo over so many others. Luck may deliver you to these opportunities, but once there, it’s up to your talents to make the most of it.

But enough about me; sorry I’m rambling so much, it’s just such a crazy moment! To riff on Hillary, it certainly takes a village to take a Pulitzer crowd shot, and I have so many people to thank for making this day possible. Obviously, a lot of praise goes to Walt Bogdanich and Amy Harmon not just for truly excellent reporting that illustrates the power of journalism but also for standing in front of me at the decisive moment.

To the amazing NY Times photography desk, for their peerless skill at capturing the moment when the winners are smiling and I don’t have a dorky look on my face. They make it look easy, but it’s not! Photography was the key difference in bringing my story to light… Of course, thanks also go to Graphics and Computer Assisted Reporting, who led the way up the stairs but at a key moment went left while I went right. And to the Web Producers who ran this photo on the website, thus ensuring I had my 15 minutes of Internet fame to blog about. And that Website which also gave me a job so that I could one day stand here. Right behind the Pulitzer winners.

Of course, thanks also go out to Renzo Piano for designing this new building with its skylight that allows me to be bathed in flattering natural light as opposed to the harsh judgment of flourescent.

And where would I be without Bill Keller who drove this story every step of the way: from calling the all-hands meeting to naming the awards to pointing out the Pulitzer winners just a few feet from where I haplessly stood.

Finally, none of this would be possible without the fine work of our publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.. Not only does he continue the best damn newspaper in the whole world. Not only did he give us this fine new newsroom. But he continues the tradition of championing excellence and integrity in journalism that all of us stand behind.

For some of us, more literally than others. Thank you.

My NYTIIH Score, Year Two

2006-12-27T12:05:00-08:00

It’s that time of the year again, when the air gets a certain crispness, snatches of holiday song fill the air, and everybody communes with their friends and family, joined in warmth by their shared commitment to one thing: figuring out their New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score. For those of you who missed this last year, I’ve started the personal tradition of reading through the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year In Ideas issue and tabulating how many of the collected phenomena I had known about beforehand. This is no mere game; a sufficiently high score is the only thing that allows me to still bask in the comfort of being “with it”, so please appreciate the seriousness of this moment.

I’ve been a bit late coming to the game this year (it’s been a really busy December), but now is the moment of truth and a big game day question: Now that I actually work at the Times, how will that affect my score? On the one hand, I am that much closer to the elitist, liberal, intellectual mindset the Times is so renowned for, so that should conceivably help my score. But – and I am painfully aware of the irony here – I find myself with so much less time to read the news these days now that I’m actually working for it, which might detract from my score.

If you’ve never read the Year in Ideas issue, give it a gander and see how much you recognize. I’m sure there will be some things you recognize a little, some you’ve known for years (as the picture shows, I’m very aware that shipping containers explain everything), and some things that will completely surprise you. And if you’re feeling competitive, tally up your score and see how intellectually hip you are. My results follow:

The Aerotropolis	The New Inequality
Air-Index Impressionism	Olfactory Cuisine
The Ambient Walkman	Paternity Confidence
The Ballot That Is Also a Lottery Ticket	Phantom Pianists
The Beer-Gut Flask	Psychological Neoteny
Bicycle Helmets Put You at Risk	Publication Probity
Big Urbanism	Redefining Torture
The Boomerang Drone	The Return of the Corporate State
Cohabitation Is Bad for Women’s Health	Reverse Graffiti
The Comb That Listens	The Robot Fielder
Creative Shrinkage	Rods From God
Digital Maoism	Sailing an Oil Tanker
The Diplomat-Parking-Violation Corruption Index	Salt That Doesn’t Stick
The Drivable One-Man Blimp	Shipping Containers Explain Everything
The E. Coli Wipe	Smart Elevators
Empty-Stomach Intelligence	The Social-Cue Reader
Energy-Harvesting Floors	Sousveillance
The Eyes of Honesty	Speed-Reducing Art
The Fashion Czar	Spit Art
For-Profit Philanthropy	Sporno
The Gyroball	Straw That Saves Lives
The Hidden-Fee Economy	Taxing Virtual Economies
Homophily	Techno Fashion
Human-Chimp Hybrids	The Tongue Sucker
The Humane Flophouse	Trash-Talk Exegesis
Hyperopia	Tushology
Indie Sitcoms	Unscratchable Paint
Jujitsu Advertising	The Visage Problem
The Lady Macbeth Effect	Voting-Booth Feng Shui
Literary Spam	Walk-In Health Care
Low Starting Prices Lead to High Auction Sales	Web-Based Microfinancing
Misery Chic	The Wheelchair Car
Money-Circulation Science	Wine That Ages Instantly
The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’	Workplace Rumors Are True
Narcissistic Celebrities	Yodeling Is Universal
N.C.A.A. Psyop	The YouTube Referee Indictment
Negativity Friendships	The Ziggurat of Zealotry

There you have it. A total score of 46 out of 74, for a NYTYIIH score of 55.4%! Given the wide-ranging scope of ideas, this might seem decent enough, except last year I scored an impressive 65.38%. Oh the humanity! I guess I’m now longer the idea hipster/coolhunter I thought I was. But can you do better?

Things I Figured Out

2006-07-03T09:58:00-07:00

And now for something different (and shorter, for those recovering from the length of the last post). Insanely talented Internet prankster Rob Cockburn recently posted a short and sweet article Things I Figured Out, where he listed a bunch of interesting and slightly stupid revelations he’s had over the years. This has been followed by 15 pages of reader comments chronicling their own brilliant insights and forehead-slapping moments.

I think this is a brilliant idea for an article, and I’ve certainly had my moments of utter brilliance and sheer stupidity (even this blog probably has examples of both). So, I’m going to post a few of the things I’ve figured out on my own or, failing that, learned the hard way. But since this is a technical blog only, there will be no personal idiocy. Just technical things I now know better about now

XML is Not For Everything Great for long data files, lousy for configuration files, downright terrible for love notes. It’s not one-size-fits-all.

XML Is a Minute to Learn, a Lifetime to Master It’s easy to gloss over some of XML’s subtleties when you begin, but they’ll get you later if you aren’t careful. Sadly, very few resources articulate some of the things that’ll get you, but maybe there’s a future blog post about that.

Somebody’s Done It Better Already I’m being glib here, but one of the joys of Open Source is that if you need a generic component, it’s best to look for someone who’s created it already. For instance, if you need a logger, you could write one on your own, but there are excellent libraries out there and your time is better spent writing stuff you can sell.

HTTP Blows Away Raw Sockets Unless you absolutely, positively have no choice, there is no reason you should use raw sockets instead of HTTP protocol for remote services. Sure, it might be harder to set up in the short run, but it’s so much easier to debug and maintain in the long run this is a no-brainer. Especially since small, light, and fast HTTP parsing libraries are available for all.

Often Too Much Is Worse Than Too Little Or as Donald Knuth put it, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve been stung so many times by trying to be clever, I’ve finally realized I should see if it’s slow before I try to fix what ain’t broke.

Stored Procedures Are Evil DBAs swear by them because they’re supposed to control access and speed up performance. In reality, they move application logic out of your program into an awkward language (SQL) that will usually fall out of sync with your application and aren’t kept consistently in sourcesafe or migrations. Worse still, they’re the trenches for warfare between developers and operations.

Developers Black-Box Way Too Much It’s too easy to leave this with a cliché admonition to “think outside the box,” but it’s sadly true. As developers, we’re taught early the useful technique of abstracting away complexity within black boxes. This is useful for that third-party API or calling operating systems, but it’s very easy to fall into that trap in your job (“we’ve always done it this way”) or your life (“I’ll just wait for career advancement to come to me”).

Physical Contact Matters The Internet still hasn’t annihilated geography yet. And personal, physical presence still matters. Meeting people is so much better than emailing them. Which I guess is just a roundabout way of saying, yet again, I should’ve gone to Railsconf. Sorry!

You’re Going to Screw Up The First Time. Just Accept It. It’s so easy to fall into the fear of not getting it right the first time, you never get started. Get over it. Accept you’re going to make mistakes the first time around and you’ll fix it later and do the best you can. And if you can, write unit tests to make it easier to clean it up when you start.

Things Break Slowly, Rarely All at Once It’s rare you can pinpoint a single decision or piece of code where everything catastrophically failed. Instead, the road to failure and mediocrity is a gradual and painful process, of many small failures along the way. It’s hard to resist the downwards momentum, because it always seems feasible to reverse. I would like to see more project management texts that tell you how to stop digging that hole.

If You Can’t Explain It, You Shouldn’t Do It. Sometimes I think half of IT operates by overwhelming your natural instincts and confusion with so much jargon, your brain just gives up. It’s a mysticism of sorts, but the wakeup to reality again is painful. My rule of thumb is if I can’t explain it in plain English using metaphors, and optionally table utensils, then it’s not worth doing. Because it most certainly will not be maintainable.

Okay, that’s all I have so far. But I’m sure the realizations will keep coming. Happy 4th of July everybody!

Happy Year of The Dog!

2006-01-30T09:01:00-08:00

Bella Enjoying a Ball at the Park

Maybe it's because I like dogs, but I have a feeling this is going to be an auspicious year.

Calculate Your NYTYIIH Score!

2005-12-19T10:08:00-08:00

For the past 5 years, the New York Times has graced with an annual roundup article titled The Year In Ideas. The issue actually came out last week, but it’s a sign of my recent workload – and the excessive number of holiday parties I had to attend – that I only read it on the commute into work today.

It actually was rather boring. Not because of the ideas themselves, but because I had actually read many of them before on various blogs and other geeky websites (Sometimes, I long for a service like “del.icio.us” for feed subscriptions just so I can share how hip the feeds I read are). I am not an information omnivore by any means, but it was apparent that I was cued into some of the same idea sources as the editors of the New York Times. Which led to an idea of my own. Since the New York Times has declared its Year In Ideas issue to be an annual tradition, I’m going to start my own personal tradition of tabulating my personal New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score (or NYTYIIH for short). The methodology is simple. Look at every idea listed and if you had heard of it before reading in the Times, give yourself a point. Okay, let’s get started then.

The following table lists the titles of the ideas in the 2005 Year in Ideas issue with bold ones being ideas I had encountered before. I know some of the titles are cryptic, but you can take that up with the New York Times editors and not me.

Accredited Bliss	Playoff Paradigm, The
The Anti-Paparazzi Flash	Pleistocene Rewilding
The Anti-Rape Condom	The Porn Suffix
Branding Nations	Preventing Suicide Bombing
Cartoon Empathy	The Readable Medicine Bottle
Celebrity Teeth	Republican Elitism
Cobblestones are Good for You	Robot Jockeys
Collapsing the Distribution Window	The Runaway Alarm Clock
Consensual Interruptions	Scientific Free-Throw Distraction
Conservative Blogs are More Effective	Seeing With Your Ears
Dialing Under the Influence	The Self-Fulfilling Trade Rumor
Do-It-Yourself Cartography	The Serialized Pop Song
Dolphin Culture	The Sitcom Loyalty Oath
Econophysics	Solar Sailing
Embryo Adoption	The Sonic Gunman Locator
Ergomorphic Footwear	Splogs
The Fair Employment Mark	The Stash Rocket
The False-Memory Diet	Stoic Redheads
The Fleeting Relationship	The Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper
Folksonomy	Subadolescent Queen Bees
Forehead Billboards	The Suburban Loft
Gastronomic Reversals	The Synesthetic Cookbook
Genetic Theory of Harry Potter	Taxonomy Auctions
The Global Savings Glut	”The Crawl” Makes You Stupid
The His-and-Her TV	The Toothbrush That Sings
The Hollywood-Style Documentary	The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution
The Hypomanic American	Touch Screens That Touch Back
The Infrared Pet Dry Room	Trial-Transcript Dramaturgy
In Vitro Meat	Trust Spray
Juvenile Cynics	Two-Dimensional Food
The Laptop That Will Save the World	The Uneavesdroppable Phone Conversation
Localized Food Aid	The Urine-Powered Battery
Making Global Warming Work for You	Video Podcasts
Medical Maggots	Why Popcorn Doesn’t Pop
Microblindness	Worldwide Flat Taxes
Monkey Pay-Per-View	Yawn Contagion
National Smiles	The Yoo Presidency
Open-Source Reporting	The Zero-Emissions S.U.V.
Parking Meters That Don’t Give You a Break	Zombie Dogs

So, what is my final score? 51 out of 78, which gives me NYTYIIH score of 65.38%! I’m quite pleased with myself this year; since I have just started, I can unabashedly call this year’s score my personal best. Can you beat me?

Web2.0 Road to Riches

2005-10-05T09:06:00-07:00

Back in the day of the first Web boom, it seems like a lot of companies were started on the simple premise of

Make a web site
IPO or maybe get bought out
Cash out with millions!

And so, a boom and bubble was born. The problem here was a lot of VCs and rational investors found themselves swept up in the frenzy back in the day, and placed their bets even though there was no real knowable way to accurately estimate the future profitability or net worth of their investments. Sure, there was a risk of failure, but that wasn’t viewed as negatively as the risk of not getting in early while it was still cheap. Add that to the later shared delusion of being able to cash out before the bubble burst, and the shortsightedness of those days is a lot more understandable. It seems though we’re on the verge of a new way of thinking:

Make a web site
Get bought out by Yahoo or Google
Cash out with millions!

Maybe I’m being a bit pessimistic (and I will freely admit I’m no business expert), but I am slightly concerned about there being a new web bubble that could lead to disillusionment over Web2.0 technology. I like Google, but I think their stock is too overvalued at over $300 a share; thankfully, the company seems interested in correcting this problem. And Web2.0 has become such a hype word among investors, it’s led to a wave of people trying to define what it is, offering alternative definitions, and mocking the business world for caring Investors looking for the next big thing are starting to latch onto the Web2.0 excitement and I think some people think Google and Yahoo can do no wrong; I only hope they do their homework first this time.

On the technical side of things, I have a fear of web developers starting companies with the sole goal of being bought by Google or Yahoo in a few years or less. There’s a big difference between planning a business for the long haul and hoping to get snatched up before you burn through all your cash in two years. So, I must admit it was with some dismay today that I read that Yahoo has acquired Upcoming.org, just like it had with Flickr. This is not to begrudge Upcoming their success (it’s a great web app), but I’m just afraid of where the combination of lazy web developers and over-eager investors will take us. We’ve been there before, and I don’t want to see it again.

And of course, the biggest problem with all this is the way in which this weaking leads to the end of the openness and choice out there now. How many options are there really if your choice for web applications is between Yahoo and Google? Will this lead to a segmentation of content and communication? And more importantly, if you think that the Web2.0 is all about the free flow and interchange of data, won’t the growth of Google and Yahoo into all areas of the Internet choke that off?

Web 2.37

2005-08-26T00:40:00-07:00

Mark my words, Hoodwink.d is one of the silliest and yet coolest new things to hit the web in a while. I won’t tell you more, but I hope to see you there soon.

Update: I stand corrected. Hoodwink.d is really a vile plot to destroy the Internet as we know it and rob us of all we love and hold dear. The resulting collapse of faith in our electronic friends will of course trigger despair, disillusionment, doubt, and more consumption of rich chocolately ice cream (it’s not all dystopic). It’s dire, but not inevitable. This can be averted now before it’s too late. Do your part. Keep using Internet Explorer. Try not to tinker. And definitely steer clear of a man called Json Parser. Thank you.

Sign Up Now for the Web1.0 Conference!

2005-06-07T14:32:18-07:00

For an amusing joke (if you're a web geek that is), look at the announcement for Web 1.0 at House of Shields (Wednesday, October 5, 2005) in San Francisco. From the agenda:

We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.

Cutting edge stuff. Although I am surprised there is no seminar like "The <blink> tag: how much is too much?"

Of Course, Episode V Is Still The Best

2005-05-24T12:16:48-07:00

For a nice laugh (with spoilers I suppose), see the excellent top ten list of the reasons why Star Wars IV is better than the latest film at O'Reilly Radar. My particular favorite:

2. Travelling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy.

which illustrates in a nutshell the biggest problems with the current batch of films. He should've left it at three.

Life Hacks For The Rest Of Us

2005-04-08T12:44:00-07:00

Like many technically oriented people, I have been following the recent upsurge of interest in exploring Life Hacks at places like 43 Folders (wiki), Life Hacker, or Tricks of the Trade. And, don't get me wrong, there are some cool tips in there on how to do things, but sometimes it's also easy to feel a bit overwhelmed at some of "Hypergeeky Hints From Heloise" tips given like

Why not "fog proof" the mirror before the shower? Two drops of liquid hand soap (or shower gel) on a folded tissue, apply to the mirror in wide circular motions (if it is a big mirror, you can do just the center part, so you can see at least yourself) until it seems you've done nothing (all the soap disappears). The water vapor will not condensate over the soap unless you take a really long shower

That is why part of me is rather amused to read Life Hacks for the Rest of Us, a tongue-in-cheek selection of life hacks for people like me. Those who would like to do things better or more efficiently at times, but are often too busy, too lazy, or some combination of both to care. And who aren't above "faking it" sometimes either. Some highlights:

If you claim to have read all the books on your shelves (but you really haven’t), when somebody asks you what a certain (um, unread) book is about or what you thought of it, say “I’ll let you find out for yourself,�? and pressure them to borrow it from you.

and

Have a goal you keep telling everyone you’re trying to attain but haven’t yet found the energy or willpower to achieve? Write something that alludes to it (e.g., a plot timeline for your “novel�?) on a piece of paper and tape it to the wall. When your friends see it they’ll assume you’re striving, which, as we just noted, is half your battle.

are just perfect. Go read the whole thing. While you're at it, also check out 43 Folders' good self parody for April Fools, April Power Hacks.