general

The last while, I’ve been working on the North Atlantic Bloom 08 Collaboratory Website at UW(ashington) APL. I finished that today (mostly, I imagine requests will continue to come in over time), and the science team is out in the North Atlantic doing science and working with their autonomous instruments as they measure phytoplankton and thus carbon flux.

It’s awesome, check it out.

IMG_4018

Originally uploaded by javith

Last week, we went to rainier vista and had a reception with the Seattle Housing Authority, Ignition NW board members, and a lot of residents of rainier vista and members of other Seattle Communities.

This tree, designed by Seattle’s Iron Monkeys, is the first permanent art piece installed by a grant from Ignition NW. It’s going into Rainier Vista, a mixed income housing project in Seattle that is pretty much ideal as far as neighborhoods go, and right next to public transit.

Our efforts at getting involved in our local community are paying off!

So, I’ve been doing a lot of research into logging & dispatching recently for one of the volunteer organizations that I’m a lead in. In the course of this, I came across this on http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq73-1.htm

Deck logs are not “Captain’s Logs”

A deck log is not a daily diary written by the ship’s captain. The “captain’s log” was a dramatic device used by the creators of the televison series Star Trek to introduce each episode, and does not exist in the U.S. Navy.

People must have been asking. This is strangely hilarious

This will be my last town hall of this term on the INW board. I am probably going to take a year off before seeking another term. It should be an interesting time, if a bit tear-jerked. Well, actually not tear-jerked, but it will be strangely bittersweet to leave the board of an organization that I’ve worked on first creating and then serving on the board of for 5-6 years now (and 9 years in some ways.)

What: The Ignition Northwest Spring Town Hall

When: Tonight, 4/17 at 7:00

Where: The CHAC Lower Level (just down the ramp) at 12th and Pine

Come on down TONIGHT for the INW Spring Town Hall. You could learn things to your advantage. On the agenda.

• Critical Massive Updates
• Election Information
• INW Outreach
• New Festivals
• Art Art ART!
• New INW Programs
• Community Announcements
• Oh, and did I mention…T-Shirts?

Come on down. See and be seen. Meet your community. Learn what we’ve done and what we’re going to do and how YOU can be a part of it. I hope to see you all there.

I was down in the bay area this weekend, so I went over to Yuri’s Night Bay Area 08, which was a party held in honor of Yuri Gagarin’s mission to earth orbit — the first time a human had left the surface of the planet in that dramatic a fashion. It’s turned into a somewhat generic celebration of humanity’s scientific achievements and hope for the future, at least locally, but it’s still held on an active NASA airfield at a NASA Base (Moffet field at NASA Ames.) I’m very much in favor of the idea of progress and not giving up on the future, so I’m pretty enthusiastic that there’s a party celebrating this sort of thing.

I’d heard about Yuri’s Night in previous years, and there was one in Seattle this year, but I very much wanted to go to the Bay Area one, so I was happy when my plans fell along with it. I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer as security staff for the event, and got to hang out with a number of other friends of mine who were also volunteering. It was, all in all, an awesome time; although as someone who’s hilariously allergic to wheat, I need to remember to bring Lara Bars in infinite numbers to events when there isn’t easy-in, easy-out.

The exhibits were awesome, the theme was awesome, my friends were very much in evidence, and it was altogether a great time. I’m very glad that I was able to go.

Yesterday morning, because my life hasn’t been busy enough the last while, I woke up, got my shit together, and then went down to the 37th precinct. My district went fairly strongly for Obama (6:1 or 8:1), and I was an alternate delegate for Obama. I figured to go and see what was happening, and it was generally a good time, but long. I generally don’t talk much about my personal beliefs here, but someone asked me to put up this writeup that I originally put in a public forum.

Act I: the beginning (1 hour)

The first hour was spent registering for my precinct, and then sitting in the bleachers waiting for things to happen. I noticed something in particular, which was that a lot of the Clinton delegates who showed up were fairly hostile, which was strange, and generally about 10 years older than I was. This (the age) was a surprise, because at my precinct caucus, the people who showed up were more or less demographically indistinguishable from any other crowd of seattleites. The Obama delegates had about the same number of people of that age, but it was if the Clinton campaign only took that demographic. (This is, of course, a generalization and completely anecdotal evidence.)

I had a lot of fun talking to a delegate (for Clinton) that I knew from a company I worked at several years ago. I also made some new friends who were also Obama delegates. At the precinct level, there were a lot of people who I knew through their involvement in the Seattle tech community. The only person I saw from my precinct at the district caucus was a really bad Clinton delegate whose speech at the precinct caucus switched a bunch of people over to Obama.

Act II: the interlude (2 hours)

A lot of the second act was spent writing email on my iPhone to various people, because not a lot was happening. A record number of people wanted to be delegates for Obama at the next level (around 500, one announcement said), which was a number that was past unprecedented and into WTF? areas. I spent a bunch of time talking to the union organizer who was there (because I was in UAW for a while (graduate assistants at the UW), I got a nifty UNION DELEGATE sticker.)

We had a bunch of speakers during this time. A lot of the judges that we have the opportunity to vote for came up and spoke. We also had Ed Murray, our district’s state senator talk for a while, which is always fun. Ed Murray is my favorite Seattle politician because he always brings up his ties to minority communities by stressing that his fiancee (male) of 17 years is Asian. Most Seattle/Washington politicians at least once you get past the Seattle level are mostly Irish, and their attempts to connect to the whole crowd are frequently bizarre logic jumps. (My ancestry is mostly also Scots and Irish, I just hate bad logic.)

Also speaking was Jim McDermott, whose speech was essentially ‘My colleagues in Washington are always amazed by the fact that I keep acting like an ultraliberal freak and you people keep sending me back. But that’s why you do it, Right?’ … the crowd then goes wild, which it generally does when he says things like this. This is a true thing he is saying, they don’t call this the People’s Republic of Washington for nothing, folks.

Eventually, the mass crowds died out and they processed everyone through. I was in the last group of alternates to be called out of the ‘alternate and guest bleachers,’ the methodology for this strangely resembled The Price Is Right.

Act III: Dramatis Personae & Exeunt Omnes (1 hour)

As I was walking over to my credentials check across the high school gym, the announcer called out that Sean Astin was in the crowd and would be addressing the audience. I’d been getting ‘dodgeballs’ that ‘Sam’ was at other caucuses, but there was a lot of idiot SMS traffic that day and I was more or less ignoring it. But, Sean Astin came out to speak on behalf of Hilary Clinton. However, by the time he reached our crowd, all the delegates but me and about 30 other people were already seated in the other room.

I walked over to the auditorium where the delegates were sitting, and it was so packed that I ended up sitting outside and chatting with my friends Eric K (Clinton) and Brian W (Obama). Eric has been a perpetual nuisance on the local burningman-bcwa lists with his strident Clinton cheering, which I only object to when he’s just promulgating media spin and not giving his own opinions. So, I chatted with them for about an hour. Mostly, we just talked about the event and the day, because we both know the others well enough to know that we’re all fixed in opinion.

Act IV: Performance Art and Resolution (1.5 hours or more)

Eventually, the Obama delegates left the clinton delegates in the auditorium and went back to the gym (because it was bigger), and each delegate who wanted to go on to the state level got 30 seconds to describe their qualifications to go. Lots of people spoke, but I think the total list was only about 100 - 200 rather than the original 500. So, people spoke about why they should go, some were funny, some were insightful, some were strident. After a really long time, we got our delegate voting sheets and I voted for the people I thought should go and then left. I missed some of the speakers, but I had said I’d actually get work done today. I think I selected a good range of people, but I was also pretty damn tired by this point.

My overall thoughts on the process is that the Obama campaign seems to be so successful here that it’s actually overwhelming the machinery of the democratic party through the amount of turnout it’s causing. Things that would usually just be a short exercise by the party faithful are getting many times the normal turnout. This doesn’t seem to be a plan on the Obama campaign’s part, it’s just occasioning such high turnouts and enthusiasm that the small number of volunteers that would typically suffice for these things are getting overrun.

I’ve been working for the scientists over at the North Atlantic Bloom 08 as part o the team making their collaboratory. This project has mostly been based on Drupal, which is a content management system (in the web sense, not the ECM sense) based largely on PHP.

One part of this is taking a lot of content over email — the scientists creating a lot of the content on the site are in the middle of the North Atlantic. Because of this, I’ve been using the drupal module mailhandler for a lot of things that would normally be done directly through the site.

Basically, changing the comparison from $data[0]=='taxonomy' to a case-insenstive comparison:

 if ((0==strcasecmp($data[0],'taxonomy')) && !is_numeric($data[1][0])) {

allows users to send in messages and have their mostly unambiguous intention followed. This is, in general, a good thing, and reflects the general net protocol practice of “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.’ This is a general guide to good behavior and successful implementation and is generally called the Robustness Principle. I advise everyone to check out RFC 1122, because it has many entertaining things to say about the nature of the Internet at the protocol level.

Anyway, so when you can actually figure out what the person meant to be doing, you should probably accept it. This is a generic problem that pops up every now and then with computers. Surprisingly often, it pops up with case sensitivity at the protocol level. Here’s another moment for me with that same issue from about 7 years ago in Apache SOAP:

I proposed changing it to:

for (int i = 0; i < pds.length; i++) 
{ 
    if (0 == propertyName.compareToIgnoreCase(pds[i].getName())) 
      { 
        return pds[i].getWriteMethod(); 
      } 
}

from:

for (int i = 0; i < pds.length; i++) 
{ 
    if (propertyName.equals(pds[i].getName())) 
      { 
        return pds[i].getWriteMethod(); 
      } 
}

This does more or less the same thing, but is in Java. This was a case where the apache implementation wasn’t interoperating with the Microsoft implementation because the MSFT implementation had a different valid interpretation of the SOAP specification than the Apache server did. Both implementations had completely reasonable behavior, but when the MS SOAP implementation responded to Apache, it did so with its own capitalization semantics (based on COM — PropertyName) instead of the Apache SOAP capitalization semantics (based on Java — propertyName). So, this is an ongoing problem that keeps showing up again and again.

I appear to be destined to run into it and advocate for the robustness principle in every technology i use, apparently. Either that, or it’s just a slow day and I’m rambling.

Tidbits, the apple weekly newsletter, missed the joke in their review of Apple Aperture 2.0.1.

In your review of Aperture 2.0.1, you note:

(Incidentally, the two videos on that page use Apple’s Victoria text-to-speech voice for the narration instead of a human voiceover, a practice I’ve not noticed before. It took a few seconds to pick out what was “wrong” - the occasional clipped words and odd pronunciations that indicated an artificial voice.)

This is a reference to the computer game Portal, the main antagonist in that game is a computer named GlaDOS, who has a voice somewhat similar to the victoria voice and that’s also the reason that there are some grammatical irregularities in the dialogue as well. (”Aperture [Noun]”, which is said several times alludes to how the computer in that game says “Aperture Science,” the name of the company.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0PDGp1hL4w

Thanks,

–Corprew

Not relevant to anything in particular, but funny.

Follow-up to the Total Eclipse (of the Heart) event I organized at Cal Anderson park. There’s been some media coverage, which has for the most part been quite nice.

More singers climbed the hill already singing the song, like a weird version of that old “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. And it was an honestly touching event: It’s hard to convey the power of dozens of people repeatedly singing “Forever’s gonna start tonight” all at once, but if you were there and you didn’t feel tingles, you must be a little dead inside.

Yesterday’s coverage from the Stranger’s Music Blog, which was really quite nice. I’m going to have to do a full media and blog roundup at some point, there has been rather a lot.

Dear All:

Please join me in Cal Anderson park on February 20th at 7:01PM to sing Total Eclipse of the Heart karaoke style for the 51 minutes that the eclipse is, in fact, total. There is a page for this event, and if you want to hold a similar event in another place, I will post it there.

If you want to bring along music to sing along to with your boombox, feel free. If you want to play an instrument, feel free. If you want to bring your whole band, go ahead. I will have a megaphone so that people can take their turn on the top of the hill if they want. If you bring your own megaphone, don’t be a dick.

Cal Anderson Park: http://www.seattle.gov/parks/park_detail.asp?id=3102

Event Start: 6:30P - End: ???
Totality Start: 7:01P - End: 7:52P

We go mobile if it seems like a good idea. It’s also my birthday the next day.

Feel free to pass this invitation along to whomever. Ideally, the skies will be clear enough to actually witness the Total Eclipse (of the Heart.)

Dress however you like, I suggest warm, festive, and moisture resistant.

Don’t come to take pictures, come to sing!

You may wish to bring coffee or other life-giving drink.

Inspiration:

fun will be had.

A blog at the Boston Globe calls my LOLCat Wasteland adaption ‘The Most Astonishing Literary Parody of 2007.’ This makes me insanely happy.

All told, we had 95 people known through the door for the conference, and probably a few more (so, say, an even 100) if you included the people who didn’t bother to register. (It was free for many attendees, and we think a bunch of people, knowing it was free, ghosted the conference.) That’s pretty awesome for a first-time conference in a community which hasn’t really done the unconference thing before.

For a bit of a change of pace, I rewrote TS Eliot’s The Wasteland in LOLCAT: here. I’ve been off busy for a bit doing various things, should have time for blogging again now.

One of the problems I’m running into a bit with the whole cuneiverse whokno.ws project is distinguishing between discussions about ‘movies’ and discussions about particular movies.

You can currently see this in the whokno.ws test category ‘Shrek,’ which pretty much exists to help test the difference between talking about the concept of movies in general and talking about particular movies.

There’s an algorithm in the whokno.ws core that distinguishes between unrelated concepts with similar written representation, distinguishing between, say China the place and China the porcelain. So, say “China (porcelain) exports from China (country)” still gets a little rocky, but “China (porcelain) exports from, say, Ireland” gets figured out pretty handily. Ideally, though, these concepts are automatically distinguished between and only rarely will a document turn up positive for both of them.

Whokno.ws uses — in its non-trivial web dump form — a SKOS concept map linked to large numbers of data files, term lists, and other impedimenta. A lot of this impedimenta is generated automatically, but some of it isn’t. It isn’t an ontology in the most formal sense of the word, although it is going to approach that in september as a source of incredibly accurate information gets mined somewhat to fill out some of the nascent semantic web bits.

The nascent semantic web bits will enable me to accomplish the original goal of whokno.ws pretty easily.

Of course, this would be more impressive if there wasn’t a bunch of bad data in today’s test run, probably causing it to be much… less relevant than usual.

One of the recent changes that I had to make is changing whokno.ws the concept thesaurus, taking it from (roughly) pre-coordinate to (roughly) post-coordinate. The problem here was that the algorithm used to determine group membership wasn’t blending well with the way the principles of divison works. I think this is a problem with statistical techniques generally.

But here’s a simple way to explain it to you: Say I have two sets, and whether you’re in that set is defined as whether an article contains a particular concept. These sets aren’t disjoint, which is to say that there’s an overlap between the two sets. For Whokno.ws, because the modelling of set membership is statistical, doing a computation *combining* the parameters appeared to be the way to go — the ranker would give high scores to things that were about *both* topics. However, it also gives a high score to things that are only about one of the two topics, but *really* about that topic.

What this means is that, say, articles about “bird flu in vietnam” are best found by looking for articles about “bird flu,” and then looking in that set of articles for articles about “vietnam.” This is very interesting to me, because it means that by the proper way to do this is actually by using the “POM” or “BOTD” engines that I’ve already written. Strange.

Saturday, I went to the morning session of BarCampBankSeattle — I wasn’t able to make it to the other sessions due to work and a wedding — and I attended a couple of sessions about various trends in banking and commerce. I didn’t get to have my session on vertical applications for banking, which is a bit of a shame, but there you go.

I went to three different sessions:

Loyalty Economics
The key question in measuring satisfaction for banking applications (and for many things, I suspect) isn’t “how satisfied are you?” but “how likely would you be to recommend this [whatever] to others?” This, followed up with “why?” is apparently a more useful metric for predicting growth than most others, and is called the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS is measured by asking people to answer that question on a scale of 1-10, and then subtracting the percentage of people who answered 0-6 (your “detractors”) from the percentage of people who answered 9-10 (your “promoters.”) Apparently, the highest rated companies on this score are Harley Davidson, Costco, and USAA.

Money as Primary Social Network
This speaker proposed moving beyond single alternative currencies (such as Ithaca Hours, and various forms of local currencies and hour exchanges) to a system where any group that was large enough in a community could issue their own currency.

This is a strange solution to a well-known problem — sometimes using money to mediate exchange of goods and services fails. This can happen when you have a group of people all willing to exchange with eachother, but they don’t actually have enough money around to mediate the exchange. In the system that currently exists, we’d have to work through informal networks to do that exchange, but in this guy’s proposed system, we’d be able to *issue* eachother currency (essentially formalized network IOUs) to mediate the exchange.

This is all true enough, but I’m not sure that the solution he proposed (100s of currencies in a city the size of seattle all done virtually over the network through a terminal at each vendor) fits the scope of the problem well.

FaceBook and Financial Applications
This was a session about whether facebook is a useful tool for financial applications to use. It mostly came out split between arrant tech utopiana and people talking about human factors in a technical frame, which I think was useful but not relevant.

In short, the conclusion was that “like AOL was, facebook is a tiny closed environment, and it’s hard to see what the impulse is for institutions and apps other than ‘getting stuff up there.’” One participant added “I expect open clients such as the iPhone to be a better investment of my development dollars than working heavily inside of facebook.”

So, that’s my participation wrap-up. Also many congratulations to Betsy and Jason whose wedding celebration I went to Saturday night.

well, I guess the Cuneiverse project resumes on Monday.

A while ago, I went to hear Chuck Palahniuk speak at Seattle Town Hall, and while he was speaking he said a lot of really entertaining things, but he also said some really interesting things about communication in general. He said that the basis of humor is surprising people, telling them something that they’re not expecting to hear. In his context ( like say in fight club), there’s usually a stark difference between how people act and how we expect them to in everyday life. In addition to all the other sorts of reactions his work provokes, there’s usually some shockingly funny stuff there.

So, that’s humor. But what about other things. Generally, most of us go through life in a state of continuous partial attention, and people find themselves not ever really focusing on one particular thing, too distracted by one thing or another to ever actually get anything done. One reaction to this is the whole Getting Things Done system for actually doing things. It’s very oriented towards keeping tasks somewhat minutely focused, and scoping tasks in and out as needed. I’m not a big fan of GTD, because it’s designed to solve a different personal organization problem than I usually have,

Claude Shannon described a problem of identifying information in his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In it, he describes information as that which you can’t predict from the previously received parts of the message. So, basically, successful time-management people are able to discriminate between the new information (where they focus) and the rest (where they pay continuous partial attention.) You see people attempting to do this (and usually failing) when they’re using their laptops in meetings. Get Things Done is a management strategy for people who are bad at this (and most are.)

When giving information (presenting, teaching, etc…) I try to give people information in a way that allows for this behavior, pushing the main themes much more than the subsidiary and supporting information. This allows the constant partial attention people to blink in and out. However, I also use a lot of humor to get my point across, and to keep people paying attention. Until I was reflecting on Palahniuk’s talk this morning, I didn’t see how this is essentially the same strategy — by confounding the expectations of what people are expecting to hear, you force them to pay closer attention.

This is my annual GPG housekeeping. Some people use the infromation contained in this message to send secure mail to me. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, feel free to ignore it. If it does make sense to you and you can’t verify this, contact me through whatever way seems appropriate. This block contains a revocation of my 5/2006 to 5/2007 key, and then a new 6/2007 to 6/2008 key.

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

My new GPG key has signature 5E74 7A06 C111 400A 0DE4  39C9 5B49 2F7C 06D4 119C

Its ID is 5B492F7C06D4119C

Here's an ASCII armored version:

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But I'd really suggest you get it from the keyserver and save yourself the import/export hassles.

Thanks,

Corprew Reed
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Because it’s come up a lot in recent days, a list of ‘popular’ (really ‘prevalent’) cognitive biases from Wikipedia. A lot of what I’ve been doing over the last several days has been wondering why people misestimate things to the extent that they do, and how to help with that. So, it’s been relevant. A good contrast to cognitive bias is ‘field sense,’ which is some people’s ability to sense their surroundings at an apparent supernatural level. While I don’t aspire to the level that Gretzky has this, it’s a useful perception style to try to develop.

This blog is (again) getting up to steam after a couple of weeks of me working on various projects (and writing more elsewhere), and then vacationing and moving. I’ve also collapsed one of my other blog projects into this one.

Since I last wrote here, I’ve been doing a bit of program management for a company based out of Austin, TX (which is not related to the cognitive biases) and it’s been fun and entertaining although it’s a very short duration project.

More on Cruel 2 B Kind (previous post)– a blog post from the Seattle PI by Monica Guzman. The PI has someone covering the tech news who also blogs about what she’s up to when it overlaps with her professional responsibility. Here’s my overlap with her experience.

Then came the finest kill of the day.

Corprew Reed was playing on a team of one. As we came around a building — bam! He got us with a “Happy Bee Day” before we knew what was coming and became the fearless leader we all desperately needed.

I recognized Reed. He had spoken at Ignite Night not too long ago. Actually, I recognized a lot of the players, I realized.

[…]
“OK. We have two options,” Reed announced to the mass. “Either we sit and wait or we take this show down Broadway.”

Moments later we were on Capitol’s Hill main drag wishing everyone we saw a happy Handshake Day. Well, why not?

Since this is my blog, I figured to only include the parts that feature me. You should read the actual article for more information on the fun.

So, I was talking to someone today about their application (which was Ruby on Rails-based), and we had a long conversation about locking. There’s a couple of different sorts of locks that show up in software development, but there’s one in particular that mostly only shows up in enterprise software development, the Long-lived Lock.

Locks are used to keep other processes from modifying resources in the system. These can show up at a variety of levels ranging from Critical Sections (Java / Win ) that synchronize access to particular pieces of code, to database locks, which keep people from reading from or writing to rows or tables while operations are done.

However, all of these operations are for short periods of time. You can’t keep a read or write lock on a row in a database for an extended period of time (or in cases where you can, you almost certainly shouldn’t..) About the longest time a row in a database should be locked is to perform a single transaction (which may be spread between multiple databases, rows, or what have you, but the time is just the changes for the transaction, not all the time that people spend staring at a screen and enterting data before hitting the return key.)

But how do you let a user lock information for an extended period of time? For example, say the user is locking a row in the database that represents a document that they’re updating (a frequent setup in most ECM/DM systems.) Well, since that’s part of the ECM system, that should happen inside the logic of that application. It shouldn’t be achieved through database locking, but should instead be stored as information within the database.

It’s possible to set this up a number of different ways, but lets assume you have a document table document and it has, by convention, an id column that represents the primary key on the table. I’m also going to make the assumption that writing to a document is done by a particular user. Your application’s security system may vary.

So, let’s look at a table set up for locking on the document table:

TABLE doc_lock
     document_id : INTEGER
     user_id : INTEGER
     lock_expires: DATETIME
END

And you just join this table in when you need to know if there are locks on a particular object, and you otherwise create and delete locks as needed. One particular thing about this sort of locking strategy is that you end up with expired locks accumulating on documents, so you want to clean those up, and also when you join in the lock table you want to have non-expired locks only.

Your app needs behavior about various things to surround this, like what’s the security model surrounding locks (who can know about them, are they on a user/group/role basis, etc…), and when can a lock be broken. Sooner or later, you’ll need to break locks, like for an employee on vacation who’s got documents locked or similar. But that’s all above the database structure and the immediate operations on the lock table, which I’m discussing here.

Well, that’s part one of three. The next segment will be the Ruby-on-Rails implementation I sketched out for my interlocutor, and the last will be some variations on and exceptions to this idea. I consider long-lived locks a design pattern, because it’s a recurring pattern in enterprise computing.

excel:business analyst::microsoft project:pm

analogies

The Hill is Ours!!!

Originally uploaded by dreamline.

Last Saturday, I ‘won’ the first Seattle instance of ‘Cruel 2 B Kind,’ the Benevolent Assassination Game. I’m very interested in ARGs in general, so I was really looking forward to playing this limited time/scope version for a while.

The essence of the game is that players go around complimenting people, and these compliments serve as weaponry against other players. When defeated, players join the team that defeated them. This rapidly causes teams to grow and become larger, and the number of teams to become smaller. To onlookers, it’s an interesting and hopefully pleasant experience, and hopefully a good counterpart to the usual Seattle Chill.

My initial strategy was to stay at the borders of the site while the initial killing spree of compliments took off. I saw S-’s team in disguise a few dozen yards away from me, and sent fake dodgeballs out to attempt to get them to leave their fixed position to attack me (allowing me to sneak up behind them.) After I got bored of that, I went over to the main part of Cal Anderson park.

After a couple minutes in the park spent talking to various people about the game and not finding any players (but hearing large teams off in the distance), I started walking in to the main part of the field. I walked around the game for a while, using ‘internalized ki’ to reduce my normal presence level.

Eventually, it ended up with a team of about 50 walking towards me (one of three left in the game), and so I hid as comically as possible figuring that I would just be captured easily and join them. However, because the team was large and non-focused, they didn’t manage to attack in even a vaguely coordinated fashion, so I defeated them all with a challenge.

Since I was now team leader, we came up with a strategy to keep that from happening to us, which was good because one of the other remaining teams met us again and again (and we tied each time, which was funny.) I enlisted people to watch the front and back of the group, and we went up on broadway greeting people and eventually ended up on teletubby hill.

We faced off against the other group with us on teletubby hill in the park and them about 20 meters away. We regaled them with ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Red Rover,’ and then walked towards them to make the final attack. It was pretty funny, and the picture in this post is from right before the end.

So, I guess I made the single largest capture in the game, and my team was the biggest at the end. This was very amusing. I ‘won’ primarily because I had a huge amount of fun playing the game. I got to lead a group of 60+ people down broadway wishing people ‘Happy Handshake Day,’ and did a lot of fun running around. It also required me to engage leadership skills to keep the team organized as it walked, in a way I usually don’t in Seattle.

As far as ARGs go, this was a great activity to demonstrate the power of games. I went home and read a book on the subject of play. It was all in all an interesting time.

I’m very interested in organizing these sorts of events, and also using them for training and the like. But, it’s great to have the chance to just participate and play in one of them, and I’m very glad that Brady and Jen organized it.

Somewhat randomly, I got contacted by someone I knew from CTY today. CTY is a program for ‘gifted children’ that I went to back when I was a ‘gifted child.’ It was somewhat strange to be contacted by someone I hadn’t talked to in 20 years, but they were doing well.

Morgan Stanley threw down some economic forecasts that make for interesting reading, and probably should be read carefully by anyone in the US who uses money or buys and sells products and/or services.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but here are our guesses: Job gains have already slowed, and payrolls will continue to decelerate, but not fast enough to undermine consumer wherewithal. The housing recession is far from over, but strong global growth likely will sustain both output and employment. The productivity slowdown is cyclical, but the trend may also have slipped. We still think core inflation has peaked, but inflation risks are rising again. And margin compression implies that profits likely will stall in 2007.

If you live in the rest of the world and not the US, you should probably check out this report instead, which deals with the growing decoupling of the world economies from the US’, as the US begins to lose its unitary global economic superpower status.

On the surface, the latest global trends seem quite consistent with a decoupling scenario. America has slowed but the rest of the world has picked up. In particular, there seems to have been a meaningful shift in the mix of growth in the industrial world. The US economy has downshifted from 3.4% growth over the 2003-05 period to only about 2% over the past year while trend growth in Europe and Japan has accelerated from around 1.5% to 2.5%.

Looks like it is going to be an interesting time, at any rate.  I’m adding this to this blog because I want to give a closer idea of the sorts of things I read from day to day.  Currently, the economic decoupling of the rest of the world from the US Economy is a fascinating topic for reading.  After Breton Woods, most of the world used the US Dollar as the chief medium of financial exchange.  In the last several years, the USD has started to be replaced by the Euro for many things, and the US is no longer the unitary financial superpower.  What this means overall remains to be seen, and many apparently discount this ‘decoupling’ idea, but with the rest of the world’s financial indicators going upwards while the US’ goes down, there may be sufficient pudding for this proof in the next several years.

Technorati Tags: economics, decoupling, euro, economy, useconomy, breton woods, morganstanley, forecasts

One of the other things I’m involved in is I’m on the board of Ignition NW, a local community development nonprofit.

People were concerned that the tone of the Organization’s blog (which I’m responsible for as the secretary of the organization) was too formal, so I’ve started pushing out updates like this. It’s interesting how much the desire for tone varies, and it’s especially interesting when you have an organization like INW whose site is for disparate audiences (members, government agencies, other art and burning man organizations) who are used to seeing different tones.

Managing tone is in some ways as important as being consistently on message. I watch it carefully, because I’m prone to subtle jokes, wordplay, and sarcasm when talking. Anyway, if you’re in the area, you should come to the town hall tonight.

The Ignition NW Board had its spring retreat at Portaplaya’s family’s cabin two weekends ago. The board has two of these a year, where we review the stuff we said we’d do in the last six months, plan for the future, and write things on our knuckles.

The town hall’s tonight, and there will be a lot of information about the stuff we’ve done, and the stuff we’re going to do. There will also be presentations from Burners without Borders and community members talking about what they’re doing. If you join us in the CHAC Lower Level afterwards, you can probably get stuff written on your knuckles too.

The town hall is at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. 1321 12th Avenue Seattle. Starts at 7pm sharpish.

Thanks,

Corprew Reed, Ignition NW Secretary.

Technorati Tags: ignitionnw

I’m currently pushing features out like a madman at gameofthe.net and related projects. There are actually four different applications (’website’) behind gameofthe.net, each of which displays information from amazon and various RSS feeds in different ways (’different slices of the same data.’) Over time, I think this will be an interesting resource for people to work with. I don’t know if this is a ’startup’ in the classical sense¹, but it’s an interesting project for me from an information science/information theoretic point of view.

Stepping back, it’s been interesting how sensitive this project has been to its initial conditions. A few small changes in user sampling has caused things to go down completely different paths than I originally would have expected. I think this is, in many ways, useful as it enabled me to get user feedback early on. However, given a slightly different sample set of initial users, the direction would have been quite different.

¹ In fact it’s not, as I’ve been at startups and this isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, whoknows

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, hireme, whoknows, tags

Until then, I will work on the remainder of the new features list for 3.0 as I have time. Right now, I’m busy applying for jobs. Want to hire a corprew? I’ll send you a resume. There’s one online as well, but I have a couple of different ones for different sorts of jobs (as I can be everything from a Web Systems Director to a Tech Lead depending on the size and type of company you have.) Full time or contract.

Technorati Tags: gameofthenet, hireme, tags, whoknows

Someone is sending out spam with a return address of corprew.org that contains windows viruses. we aren’t this host, we don’t run windows, and no one here runs outlook.

Calculated Risk: Tanta: Information is Power, Which is Why You Don’t Get Any

I thought this might make an interesting counterpoint to many idealistic discussions of information.  It discusses how information gets used, misused, and not used at a bank.

I was talking to someone today about my realization that a lot of my exposures to the ideas that are important in Enterprise Content Management and Knowledge Management were actually contained in the books of Robert Anton Wilson, a counter-culture article who recently passed away.

RAW had a lot of insights into how people’s minds worked, and although he’d have probably found this pretty horrifying or hilarious, a lot of insight into how businesses worked as a result.

The prime example of this is the Snafu Principle, the poem associated with I’ll reproduce here:

In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void.

And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: “It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer.”

And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: “It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it.”

The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus: “It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”

The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: “It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong.”

And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. “It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful.”

The Vice President rushed to the President’s side, and joyously exclaimed: “This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!”

And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.

Don’t know if it was originally his, but his writings were my first exposure to the ideas of people changing how they transferred information in regards to the power dynamics around them. That idea has stuck with me, and as I’ve gotten to work more in the ECM and KM spaces, I’ve gotten to see how a lot of the software written there is actually about attempting to get around how people communicate in regards to power and threats to their own security (siloing, withholding, spinning, eliding.)

Anyway, I’d just thought I’d share that, because I was thinking about RAW and KM at the same time today.

Technorati Tags: robertantonwilson , knowledge management, km, ecm, enterprise content management

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

After looking at the periodic table of visualization methods, a lot of people have commented that the periodic table is, in and of itself, a visualization method.  Ironically, however, it isn’t apparently contained within the periodic table.

The question I have is whether the periodic table is a treemap with all equal size boxes, and ordering determined by the row being the number of electron shells and columns being the number of electrons in the unfilled shells.  The grouping is by similar chemical properies (so, for example, Nobel Gases, Metals, Lathanides/Actinides, and etc…  are all their own groups, and could also be described as the configuration of electrons in the shells.)

There are other possible visualizations of the periodic table that make this sort of thing a lot clearer (and there are basically a crazy number of sites with this information), and the current table seems like more and more of a hack now that there are so many more elements around than when Mendelyev came up with it.  In particular, the way that the Lanthanoid and Actinoids are squeezed into the table seems particularly inelegant.  I can only imagine how strange things will get over time as more elements are ‘discovered’ and physicists begin to get super-heavy elements that are actually stable on non-crazily short time scales…

But, anyway, so, the Mendelyev visualization is almost a treemap, but is it really one?  Enquiring minds want to know.

Technorati Tags: periodic table, visualizations, datavis, electrons

corprewland » set up ssh for no remote password login

Passwords are not particularly secure. It’s hard to make, remember, and use one that is hard for programs to guess. Therefore, people who case about security frequently use a package called OpenSSH for logging into remote hosts to work instead of telnet.

I’ve been working with a bunch of people for the last while, who wanted to have their sessions logging into remote machines not be trivially snoopable and also wanted to not have to remember their passwords for a bunch of machines. I wrote up a set of instructions based on openssh that are designed to make this relatively straightforward.

This is how I normally use remote unix boxes — set my password to an ludicrously long, difficult to crack/remember/whatever string and then use ssh and public key encryption to actually log in. It works for me. These instructions are probably most useful for MacOSX and other unix (Linux) users (and MS Windows users using cygwin on the command line.) Most Windows users will want to use Putty, which is a fine package of encryption tools for that platform.

Technorati Tags: ssh, security, password, openssh, login, remote login

Two recent things of note on this blog.  Surreally, I became the #1 hit for various phrases having to do with ‘auderves’ because I’ve got somewhat of a strange sense of humor, so I created an ‘auderves’ page that points people at ‘hors d’oeuvres’ and gives some recipes.  Seemed like a good plan.

Also, apparently by posting about  Jordan Weisman’s comments at  Dorkbot Seattle, I managed to  help people figure out who was doing the vanishing point game that started yesterday at CES.  Interesting.  Apparently, entry points to this game are in a lot of the vista filled gift/review laptops that microsoft has been sending out to high-end bloggers and others.  It’s pretty hilarious, overall.  I’m hoping to get into making these games in the next several months, at least as a small scale hobby.  So, we’ll see what happens.

Also, I’ve switched from using ecto, which is a blogging program for the macintosh to using a blog program built into firefox.  Ideally, this should help me keep things updated.

And that’s it for updates — I’m going to be updating a lot of the pages (as opposed to blog posts) on corprew.org in the next while, and I’ll probably post again when I’m done with that.  Currently, there’s going to be more ‘review this specification’ stuff coming through the blog for the next while.  I’ve got a couple of different ones on the queue.

Well, we appear to be safely up and running at our new home. I moved corprew.org from the old Static Factory Media hosting machine to a new home at dreamhost. Largely, I needed to install some demo applications I’ve written which require more resources than SFM’s host machine can spare for any particular client (it remains a good machine for general hosting needs and is operated by BizNik, who acquired SFM’s technical assets approximately six months ago and are excellent people whose services I highly recommend.)
SFM was an interesting company, with a lot of promise but plagued by many of the problems that plague startups. It didn’t really consistently keep a single message, but I learned a lot about running a business from it. I wasn’t one of the executives, but had experience running businesses, and therefore advized on various areas.

Over the years I was involved with them, I had to jump in and help with administrating the SFM machine a lot. So, moving my stuff off that machine represents an end for me to my involvement with my role there. It’s strange, and bitttersweet. Because there’s a lot of happiness to being done with particular things even when they have a lot of good memories, which being involved with SFM did.

corprew.org is in the process of moving to a new host.  please excuse any difficulties between 12/29 and 1/3 as stuff gets transferred to a new site (and various new technologies.)

At some point in most people’s lives, they sit down and try to do something. There are a variety of methods of figuring out how people do things, but I thought I’d try and explain this in sort of an information science friendly way. So, here’s a lovely(ish) explanation of why you can’t get anything done (in information science, with pictures and diagrams.)

Obviously, actually doing something presupposes an actor, and generally, this actor is a person. This causes a number of inconveniences, but as of yet there hasn’t been much we can do about it. Occasionally, you get computers doing things on behalf of people and complicated rube goldberg machines with gears, rope, and most of the contents of a decrepit hardware store, but let’s not try to draw one of those. We’ll also ignore robots, because we know how that sort of thing generally turns out.

So, yeah, you have this person sitting around and then suddenly they get a crazy idea that they actually want to do something. If we can’t dissuade them of this, we’ll call it ‘performing an action,’ and put it on the diagram as follows. It’s customary to represent the action as an arrow with subject and object at the head and tail, but here we’re going to make the action a circle and the arrow can be doing. For example, consider bob goes to the store — typically, you’d represent this as subject ‘bob’ action: ‘goes to the store’, but here we’re representing this as subject: ‘bob’ object: ‘goes to store’, with the action ‘does.’

This is called ‘reification,’ and is like ‘objectification’ for verbs. It’s either a complex intellectual process or a handy trick for making diagrams. At any rate, it’s a suitably long word.

You might say okay, that sounds fairly reasonable and non-problematical, but it just gets more complex from there.

Most people have a very complicated view of the world, but despite that manage to get through life without too many unusually horrible things happening to them. There are occasional exceptions to this, like people whose worldview consists entirely of ‘stuff’ or desire for products advertised on television. In general, though, people’s conceptual world consists of cloudy masses of ‘things’ and ‘stuff.’

Every action requires specific pieces of information do to it. For example, getting to work in the morning generally requires one to know where one’s pants (or pants equivalent) is.

People, with the possible exception of astronauts, don’t operate in a vacuum. They generally operate in a context, which can be summed up as ‘all the information that they bring with them to a particular task.’ This context is accumulated throughout people’s entire lives, and can conveniently be thought of as ‘why other people are wrong.’But are people actually wrong, or do they just have different opinions on what makes up reality?

The last part of this is the domain, which reflects that people, even thought they may be doing the same action with the same information and same context, may do something entirely different depending on the ‘field’ they’re working in or trying to serve. To use a somewhat gross simplication, the action “this hamburger should have cheese on it” may have a very different response depending on the environment (sort of restaurant) the person is working in, even if it’s the same person.

To top this off, things like Cognitive Work Analysis divides domain up into about 7 different layers, all of which come together in a big bullseye, but I’m only making so many lines in these damn diagrams. Personally, I think about this as as a massive oversimplification of this and call it the PICAD model, because calling things ‘ACRONYM model’ makes it seem more impressive than a bunch of circles with arrows in a box.

ocean

Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist.

After the playa this year, I dropped a friend who’d rolled his vehicle off at his house in Corvallis, and then went out to the Oregon Coast and cruised up it into Washington. This marks the completion of the entire length of 101 for me, although I plan to redo Corvallis -> Bay Area at some point.

While I was out there, took some time to see the major sites and enjoy some of the parks in the area. It was a quick trip, but felt good after the two weeks of heat on the playa.

best slide ever:

Q: car, d1: driver, d2: fish ——> S(d1, q) > S(d2, q)

(where S == Semantic Term Matching)

aside from that, I missed blogging the last talk in Semantics due to the laptop battery dying.

Technorati Tags: informationretrieval, semantics, sigir, sigir2006