June, 2006
47 posts under this date.
It’s strange. I just started getting some good momentum coding and designing when my family (save my dad, who has to work) together with my grandfather are off to Vallarta. Quite frankly, I would much rather code away and read UI patterns (it’s just that I don’t want to rest now, I want to code!), but this is the perfect opportunity to get that biography and I know I’ll regret it if I miss it (my grandfather is 84 after all). Oh well, 5 days of sand and beaches shouldn’t be too harmful. So goodbye, for a while (there won’t be web where we’re staying).
It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.
Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.
Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?
OK, back to work.
I almost forgot to tell you! A couple of days ago I spent some time with my most-admired 84-year-old maternal grandfather, Luis, and the very first thing he said to me was (translated, of course): “Do you remember that you once told me you wanted to write my life? I’ve been thinking about that lately, and, well, would you still be willing to write my life if I told it?”
“Yes!” I shouted, of course. And so we’re now waiting for our schedules to coincide (he’s a very busy man). The plan is for me to (video)tape several interviews of him about his life, give them some form, and produce a booklet out of my notes. It sounds most challenging and fun. If all goes well, you’ll soon be able to read here how it came to be that a lice once saved my grandfather’s vision (true story).
How Vanessa-Mae-ish of me!
One of the great hazards of supermarket shopping has always been the tabloids lining the checkout lane, assailing us with tawdry tales of celebrity misfortune. Infidelity, infertility, addiction—all are grist for our sadistic lust to see stars brought down to the same lowly level as us. As French intellectual Edgar Morin wrote in The Stars, his classic book about movie idolatry, ”Every god is created to be eaten.”
With this in mind, enjoy the surprisingly thoughtful (verbal abuse is an art form, as Borges himself once wrote about), unrelenting Washington Post article on Britney. Here some teasers:
Pregnancy cleavage can be a beautiful development, but serving up one’s bosom like melons at a picnic is aggressively self-indulgent, enormously distracting and, unless you’re auditioning for a spread in Penthouse, unnecessarily vulgar.
Spears fidgeted, blathered and wept through the interview last week and one couldn’t help but gape in amazement at her astonishing aesthetic meltdown. It’s hard to recall the last time someone as famous as Spears—without any accompanying substance-abuse rumors—appeared so startlingly, slovenly wretched. The pop singer’s golden glow of stardom had been dimming, but this was the moment when it dropped below the horizon.
During the “Dateline” interview, Spears tearfully implored the paparazzi to leave her alone. Her pleas were reasonable and tugged at the heart. One came close to forgetting that she had encouraged the attention with her provocative videos, snake-charming stage performance, open-mouthed Madonna-kissing, 15-minute marriage, grotesquely narcissistic reality show and second husband known for displaying the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed.
I set out to serve me. Rails is a very selfish project in that respect. It gained a lot of its focus and appeal because I didn’t try to please people who didn’t share my problems. Differentiating between production and development was a very real problem for me, so I solved it the best way I knew how.
It’s hard enough to solve your own problems with eloquence. Trying to solve other people’s problems is damn near impossible—at least to do so to the level of satisfaction that would make me interested in the solution.
That’s why we hold the notion that ”frameworks are extractions” so very dear in the Rails community. Frameworks are not designed before the fact. They’re extracted when you’ve proved to yourself that an approach works. Whenever we get ahead of ourselves and try to leap over the extraction process, we come back sorely disappointed.
I believe that’s why Rails just feels right for so many people—because it’s been used by real people for real work before we dished it out for others to reuse.
I may be besotted with infatuation right now, but I believe there’s true wisdom—hard, distilled, endlessly applicable wisdom (well, what is wisdom if not particularly broad and useful patterns?)—up there.
And as a sidenote, I propose a new dictum based on the quote’s last paragraph: Use before you reuse.
Me gustaría poder leer y responder todos los mensajes que llegan a mi página, agradecer las buenas ondas, discutir los desacuerdos y cambiar opiniones en general, pero el trabajo ya le roba tantas horas a mi vida que si además me quedara escribiendo mails, dejaría de tener tiempo para ver a mis tres hijos, disfrutar a mi amorcito, escuchar a mis amigos, soportar a mi madre, depilarme las piernas, salir a la calle, emborracharme de vez en cuando y, por qué no, angustiarme cuando no hago nada en vez de disfrutarlo.
Estoy segura de que todos aquellos que conocen mi trabajo y mi forma de pensar van a poder comprenderlo, y ojalá lo hagan, porque ya bastante remordimiento siento al no poder contestarles. Y a los que no puedan, bueno, incluso prefiero que piensen que soy desconsiderada, egoísta, maleducada y presumida antes que tener que terminar diciendo, como Baudelaire, ”perdí mi vida por ser amable”.
Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident—there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.
I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.
Except for its nasty tendency to crash unexpectedly (great strides have been made, but it still does it once in a while), Azureus is pretty much the BitTorrent Client. My favorite thing about it (and this seems to be a pattern of open source projects) is its extensibility. There’s everything from a Flag plugin (to get a kick out of how international piracy is!) to a Web (HTML+JS+CSS) UI to the program.
But my favorite plugin is far and away 3D View—a dense, beautiful 3d representation of the torrent process (really, just the standard swarm graph writ 3d). Like the 12/60 clock, it comes with no instructions but it doesn’t need them. If you’ve read anything about how torrents work (and you should!), everything will fall into place after some staring. Its pure infosight—real-time infoporn of the best kind1.
1 Which reminds me: I heard somewhere today that “there is no such thing as bad porn, there’s only better porn.”
I feel naive and pretentious today, and I feel like writing down some of my fundamental beliefs in whatever simplistic terms my 21 years are able to muster. These are some of the rules that I’ve gleaned throughout my life, those by which I want to live my life, and those thru which I choose to conceive the world. They are not written in stone, they’re not hold-come-what-may, nothing is, but they are among the more hold-more-stubbonly-at-least that I’ve got. And they are in turn based on some even more fundamental certainties: that knowledge is better than ignorance, that love is better than indifference, that technology is better than helplessness, that liberty is better than slavery.
The form I’ve written them in is not arbitrary, I believe each of the 4 axes (knowledge, love, technology, and liberty) can be approached in basically just 3 ways:
That which is looked for can never be attained.
Reasons vary but self-flagellation is among the more common: we’re simply too stupid, too egoist, too different, too irresponsible, too brutish, etc. Or perhaps the gods are simply too wily, too treacherous, too twisted, or too evil.
This is not only the laziest attitude to take, it is plainly false and misleading, for we’ve all understood something, loved someone (however briefly or faintly), achieved something thru technology that we wouldn’t had been able to do alone, and been part of free societies (your family, your friends, spontaneous commercial activity…).
It is the opposite of action, the opposite of hope, and it is embraced only after a lifetime of the most demeaning indoctrinations (see Religion).
That which is looked for can be attained sometimes, but usually not.
The usual attitutude, it at least acknowledges everyday experience. Though not necessarily harmful, it shortchanges its believer and generally leads to apathy, because we give up too easily.
In it most dangerous form, it borrows from the previous attitude, either casting us as unworthy searchers of the particular instance or wrapping it up in mystical mumbo jumbo à la élan vital.
That which is looked for can always be attained.
This is the only creative attitude and the only one with any merit. For it is the only one that spurs us to action, blaming the responsibility for improvement squarely at us (and that’s why this attitude is so hard to even entertain—laziness is just so comfy). It is the only empowering attitude, the only one that offers hope, tapping boundless creativity and ingenuity that would otherwise remain dormant.
In its root it is simply another face for the fundamental problem strategy of assuming there’s a solution:
I have found there are ways to foster finding useful analogies when working on problems. First, you need to assume up front that there is an answer to what you are trying to solve. People give up too easily. You need confidence that a solution is waiting to be discovered and you must persist in thinking about the problem for an extended period of time.
Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence
And do note that it cannot be falsified: if that which is looked for has not been attained, even after a million millennia of trying, this does not imply that it is not attainable, just that it has not been attained yet, that we still haven’t tried hard or smart enough. It is thus, to a degree, an act of faith, but one which we, and we alone, are responsible to carry out.
And so here they finally are, 4 things I believe in:
Anything can be understood.
Intelligence itself, Mind, Consciousness, Emotions, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Anyone can be loved.
Anyone. I repeat: Anyone. Gender, Age, Race, Class, Nationality—they’re only bothersome hurdles, not insurmountable ones.
And mind that I’m not talking here about sexual love or romantic love, I’m not talking about the love whose opposite is hate, I’m talking about the one whose opposite is indifference.
Anything can be done thru technology.
Universal Translation, Space Colonization, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Uploading, Time Travel, Eternal Youth, Immortality, Abundance, Artificial Reality, Godness.
Anything can be done thru liberty.
That is, anything can be done thru voluntary agreements (the free-market, nonprofits, open source, whatever). In fact, I believe a substantially bigger claim: everything that can be done thru coercion (that is, thru violence or its threat), be it for good or for ill, can be done better thru liberty.
Applied, this means that private money, private law, private health systems, private roads, private intellectual property protection, private police, private FDAs, private militia, private philanthropy, etc. are not only possible but preferable to their modern, illegitimate incarnations.
If the Internet is anything, it’s a collection of minds and wills. If the evidence is there, the minds believe.
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