weblog.masukomi.org

A thought exercise for programmers June 21, 2007

In the not so recent “outsourcing” episode of 30 days the American whose job has been outsourced to India goes there and comes to a number of interesting realizations including this:

“Knowing that probably like 16 people are surviving off of my one job … it’s almost like charitable at that point. They need the job way more than I do.”

Your thought exercise for the day is to answer this question: What can you do as a developer to justify yourself as being more valuable than sixteen Indians?

Restrictions: If you are going to participate in this thought exercise you can’t just blow it off by suggesting that outsourced code sucks. I have seen many examples and yes, it generally does, but can you honestly say that yours is so much better that you should keep your job when the alternative is, in essence, to let sixteen other people benefit from the work assigned to you? This is not a question you can get out of on technicalities like pointing out that they could get other jobs or that the economics aren’t actually that cut and dry. It is a question of morality and value.

I think there are less than 100 coders out there whose contributions can pass this test. I don’t think I am one of them…yet. You probably aren’t either. So what can we do as coders that can benefit others so much that it would be morally better for us to keep our jobs than giving them to sixteen others? The two biggest things that come to my mind are teaching and becoming a major contributer to a software project that significantly benefits thousands of people.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Dear Universe: June 20, 2007

I understand that the current events are most likely due to some form of karmic retribution for past mis-deeds. I’m down with that. I’m sure I deserve it for some reason. However, I think some paperwork has gotten lost. Usually there seems to be some constructive lesson to be learned in the midst of the bad karma, but I’m not seeing it. Or, maybe I just didn’t understand the message when it came. Please, if at all possible, resend notification as to which lesson I’m supposed to be learning from this, preferably without any more bad karma. If more bad karma is required to re-convey the lesson again please don’t. I will hopefully figure it out given enough time.

Love,
Kate

Popularity: 4% [?]

Entrepreneurial Brilliance… almost

Entrepreneurial Brilliance…. almost.

[Update: CK has pointed out that i had an extra zero in my calculations which made the process of getting the sheep cost $20 instead of $200. Unfortunately at $200 to get the sheep made this isn’t nearly as brilliant. Thanks CK]


http://www.TheSheepMarket.com



Pay $0.02 to anyone willing to “draw a sheep facing left”.

Allow Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to manage that process until you have 10,000
sheep ($200.00).

Buy a domain name (going price is roughly $8).

Buy some cheap hosting (as little as $5 per month on some ISPs).

Spend some time to put all the sheep on the site.

Let people choose a unique block of 20 sheep and convert them into stamps using
some unspecified but probably simple automated service.

Charge people $20 per block of 20 stamps.



The ONLY problem with this is the cost of creating a sheet of 20 custom stamps.
Zazzle currently charges $18.99, which explains the $20 price per block of 20
stamps. Which means that the only financial winner in this process is
Zazzle, or
Stamps.com, or whoever
else who can print custom stamps.



I applaud the idea, think it’s brilliant, and wish he wasn’t getting screwed on
the stamp generation. Maybe if you could buy the blocks of 20 sheep on shirts,
or a poster of all of them, or… everything
CafePress offers.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Geeks Don’t Touch June 19, 2007

Have you noticed? Geeks don’t touch. I noticed this in myself a while ago, and
have since been watching other geeks to confirm my theory. I was at the
Boston
Ruby User’s Group a week ago and essentially no-one touched. When two geeks
are introduced, unless it’s a somewhat formal introduction like an interview, we
don’t shake. When we encounter each other, or go our separate ways, there’s no
casual touching. Many will actually wave at each other in greeting from a few
feet apart so as to avoid the simple touch that normal people would expect. I
think it’s the touch of
Asperger’s
that the best of us seem to have inadvertently exposing
itself.

…Some may even be
pathologically
sensitive to loud noises (as some people with AS have
hyperacusis),
strong smells, or dislike being touched; for example, certain children with AS
exhibit a strong dislike of having their head touched or their hair disturbed
while others like to be touched but dislike loud noises.

I wouldn’t say that most geeks are “pathalogically sensitive” to touch but
please don’t think that the geek in your life is being antisocial, or
intentionally rude, or anything like that if they eschew the common social
touches. I think that most of us just don’t like to touch anyone who isn’t
particularly close to us emotionally.

Popularity: 4% [?]

All roads lead to cross-dressing actors June 18, 2007

So I was poking around Netflix looking for things to add to my queue when something I’d been observing for a while came to the fore-front. The vast majority of the movies Netflix recommends to me (excluding the sci-fi) it recomends because I enjoyed Priscilla Queen of the Desert and think Eddie Izzard is effing hillarious. Why? I’ve rated hundreds of movies (537 to be exact) and it’s those two that drive all my recommendations… I recognize that they’re fairly unique and a statistically significant indicator of other things I’d like but damn!

Trivia: The main character of Priscilla Queen of the Desert is the guy who plays Agent Smith in The Matrix.

On a related note why does Netflix never have any Sci-Fi recommendations for me? All it ever recommends is Dark City which I’m not interested in seeing any time soon. Also, if you happen to be a Netflix user feel free to link to me as a friend there.

[Update] Speaking of movie recommendations… Can anyone recommend some good Bollywood musical to me or is it just pointless to try and watch a musical if you don’t speak the language it’s in? I’ve never tried but I went out for indian with friends the other night at a place that is always playing crazy Bollywood movies or Indian music videos and now I’m in the mood to see a good one.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Announcing Compensate

I’m happy to announce the release of my latest little rails app
Compensate.
As some of you know I’ve been having money troubles. My biggest problem is that
I have a big pile-o-bills and a little pile-o-cash. The problem with the
existing apps out there is that they don’t let you manage and track your bills
before you’ve paid them.  Compensate does. Enter your bills and then
figure out which ones get paid when. It’s simple, it’s not pretty, but I find it
useful and, seeing as money management seems to be an all-too-common issue
amongst geeks, I figured it might help someone else if I released it.



The one thing that compensate has going in it’s favor over most web based money
apps is that I will implement essentially any nifty or useful feature that gets
sent my way. I have no vision or goal for this app other than having a useful
tool to manage my money and it already does that, so everything else is gravy.
It still needs docs, but it’s a really simple app (good for getting started with
Rails too), and even has a little DSL built into it for the more common tasks.
The only catch is that any feature that is more significant than a GUI tweak
needs to come with unit tests to make sure it doesn’t screw up any-one’s account
balances.



Have fun. Download it. Fix it. Tweak it. Ignore it. Whatever.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Handful-o-berries June 17, 2007

Every day, before it gets too dark, I have to make sure to paw through my strawberry patch to see what’s ripe. If I forget a few may become too ripe or get eaten by bugs I never see. This pic is about two-thirds of an average days haul. I love picking these. It’s a little handful of happy every day. I’ve also got more fresh mint and rum than I know what to do with… Mojitos anyone?

I also accidentally discovered an excellent summer treat. Eat one strawberry, let the juices fill your mouth, and then, eat a bite of fresh Rice Krispies treat (home-made not that evil pre-packaged crap). Combining them in your mouth doesn’t work nearly as well.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Programming books for newbs June 14, 2007

Most of you are programmers and that means that from time to time you’ll
encounter people who want advice on leaning to program. And, it’s hard to point
them in the right direction because we generally don’t want to spend the time to
teach them ourselves and even if we did most of the learning to program books just plain suck.
So, I’d like to recommend two books. The first is
Learn
to Program by Chris Pine. This is the best intro to programming that I’ve
ever seen. It’s not concerned so much with how to do things in a specific
language as it is with teaching people the basic principles of programming
although it uses Ruby to do so. It’s based on a series of
tutorials
that are still online but have been improved on, and expanded upon greatly
in the book. There’s also
JavaScript:
A Beginner’s Guide by John Pollock which does a surpisingly good job of
teaching basic programming concepts with JavaScript. It’s not that JavaScript
makes this hard, it’s that most of the books get sidetracked on doing html
specific things instead of actually teaching people to program. Yes, the Rhino
book
(JavaScript:
The Definitive Guide ) is undeniably a good JavaScript book but it’s not
good for people who don’t know how to program.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tita Lima

I’m not normally one to go out of my way to promote an album, but I’m freaking loving 11:11 by Tita Lima and I figure there are a handful of you who might too. The first couple songs don’t thrill me but once you hit Maremoso it’s all good (except Introbox which i don’t count). If you are only going to check out a couple songs check out Esquizofrevo, Catatonica, and my Molho Ble. While I’m at it I’d like to recommend Hot Bitch Arsenal especially the “hba live @ red square, new year’s eve 2006″ track. And of course the site I found them on Amie St. It’s funky. Songs start out free and gradually increase in price up to about a dollar as they become more popular. Be one of the first to check out an album / song there and you get it really cheaply.

Popularity: 3% [?]

FizzBuzz Overthink now with Python June 7, 2007

I’ve just added a Python implementation to the
FizzBuzz Overthink
which means we’ve now got good examples of how to write, document, and unit test
object oriented code in Java, Perl, Python, and JavaScript. The site has more
details, including how to contribute a FizzBuzzOverthink in your favorite
language.



Notes:

It’s been a while since I’ve written any Python so I’d be happy to hear any
suggestions. Also, if you’ve found the FBO useful for teaching your friends or
coworkers how to write tests, or document their code, or anything else, please
drop me a quick note ( masukomi at masukomi dot org ) as it would be nice to
know that this is actually benefiting people.





P.S. What’s the deal with pydoc being so poorly documented? I ended up going with Natural Docs for the Python version too because none of the Python specific tools seemed to even come close or be anything I’d call a standard.

Popularity: 3% [?]