Soft Arts

Bill Bumgarner, Apple’s resident tequila aficionado, has published his notes on tequila. It is fantastic.

link

Garrett, Erik, and I headed down to Railsconf in Portland, Oregon last week and we had a great time.

Possibly the only real crisis occurred when the local television station had a service interruption - during the last 30 minutes of the season finale of LOST.

There were several outstanding presentations, particularly by Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic and Ryan Singer of 37 Signals.

I will try and add more about this later, I’m beat right now. The presentations were almost all excellent and we made some great contacts during and outside of the conference. I’m actually a little frantic about keeping all of the names and faces straightened out - there were a lot of people interested in doing business with us.

You can see a few shots I managed to take on flickr.

(NB: I originally posted this under the pen name of “Lee Morgan” in 2005).

A long time ago, long before I went to college, I worked as a dishwasher.

I must admit, for me, it was a dark time.

After several months of pearl diving, the sous chef, a great fellow named Bryan, offered me a position as a prep cook. “Dan,” he said, “I think that you’d make a great prep cook. You’re lazy.”

I was really hurt by his comment. I always worked hard and fast! How could he say something like that!?

He saw that I’d taken the bait. “Dan, what I mean is, you don’t have any tolerance for doing unnecessary work. You’re efficient. That’s what we need in prep cooks, because they have to do a lot of work in an eight hour shift. If you don’t learn how to save time, you won’t be done with your work when it’s time to go home.”

So they made me a prep cook. And I got buried. There really was a lot of work to do. And after about a month, Bryan started teaching me all of his tricks. After about four months, another prep cook told me that he’d been told in his review “you don’t have to be as good as Dan. Being *half* as good as Dan would be a good move for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Bryan had been right. I work hard, and I despise inefficiency. And ultimately, it paid off for for me.

And the lessons that I learned slicing cases of produce and making ten gallon batches of soup and salad dressing paid off nicely when I finished college and moved into the software industry.

I fervently believe that it is completely worth everyone’s while to spend a lot of time getting your build environment set up and automated. When you are prototyping a new product, particularly a distributed one, building and deploying your product can take anywhere from several minutes to half an hour or more. Taking the time to automate your build can save you a huge amount of time and effort further down the line, particularly when you are troubleshooting and making frequent changes to your build.

When you are debugging code a long build and deployment process with lots of manual steps can derail your train of thought and cause you to make mistakes, forget what you were trying to do, or miss details you meant to watch out for when you finally got an opportunity to run your code.

This has been most apparent in servlet and midlet development, but it is also a huge factor in cluster and grid applications, particularly MIMD applications, where different nodes may be running different applications.

Arrgh. I have more to say about this, but it’s getting late. Time to sign off for now.

In the summer of 1994 I started a research assistantship at the Aerospace and Energetics Research Lab at the University of Washington. I joined a team working on something that Abe Hertzberg, who was the AERL director at the time, whimsically referred to as the Smogmobile. The car was steam powered, but used boiling nitrogen (highly purified air) instead on water.

Abe was motivated to try this approach because he had realized that battery powered electric cars, which were a popular idea at the time, weren’t going to scale effectively. By the time they were being used in the same numbers that internal combustion engine-powered vehicles were, disposal of the cars’ used lead-acid batteries would pose a formidable environmental problem.

This is certainly not a new conundrum - when the automobile was first introduced to London it was considered to be a source of great relief. The city streets at that time were subjected to an estimated 100 tons of horse manure per day due to the culture’s heavy dependence on horse drawn carriages.

Other problems, such as disposable diapers, have followed a similar pattern.

After years of seeing the same patterns I eventually formulated what I used to call “Pasco’s Law,” and will now formalize as “Pasco’s Law of Universal Adoption*” as I haven’t seen it articulated anywhere else yet:

        Everything has a negative environmental impact when enough people start using it

Looking at it another way, this could in someways be considered as an environmental application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

As a consequence, when presented with alternative energy ideas, my tendency is to look at the impact of the the approach, no matter how small, and consider the impact of it’s adoption on a global scale. I think that this is the only sensible rubric for picking a new energy source - you have to speculate on the scalability of the solutions in order to make a sensible comparison of them.

That being said, I think that there are some interesting ideas being tossed around and I’m interested in finding out more and being involved in the process of finding out what our future will be.

*If I’m lucky, I’ll have other ones before I retire.

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environment, alternative energy

If you haven’t caught an episode before, check it out. Hysterical.