# (1) 05 Feb 2012, 09:30AM: Yet Another List:
This weekend I have gotten to spend some lovely lengthy quality times with my pals Camille and Julia and Nick, and met Nick's friend Jana. Yay! We talked about the standard things: work, relationships, books, Battlestar Galactica, software development, art, volunteering, activism, &c.
In between, I caught up a bit on comic books. I went to Midtown Comics, my usual haunt, and got the most recent trades of DMZ and The Unwritten. The staff weren't that helpful in my explorations, though -- for example, when I asked about what Alison Bechdel's been up to, I got basically a shrug.
The next day, I visited Forbidden Planet south of Union Square, and the staff seemed far more helpful and sympathetic. When I got up the nerve to ask, "What comics have people who look like me?" they were actually interested in figuring it out and loading up my arms. "OMG you haven't read Love And Rockets?!"
(Doesn't it suck that so much of the Virgin India line is just crap?)
So, since it's on my mind, some comics that feature women of color as interesting characters:
- Amar Chitra Katha series -- the comics I grew up with, telling Indian history, myths, legends, and fables. Draupadi! Savitri! Parvati! Sati! And so on.
- Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. I read the whole thing, I loved it, it's what got me back into comics a decade ago. Most of the characters are women, and I'm thinking especially of 355 (African-American), Dr. Mann (American of Chinese and Japanese ancestry), and You (Japanese).
- DMZ by Brian Wood, which I read avidly. Volunteer medic Zee Hernandez isn't the main character but she's in there and important.
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, her autobiography about a childhood in Iran. A modern classic, and can you believe I'm only reading this now?
- Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. Ditto. (I'm a Philistine!)
- Aya series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, about a family in the Ivory Coast. I haven't read it yet but it's come recommended.
- Lots of stuff by Lynda Barry. I like her stories (but find her art style a little overwhelming).
- Patrick Farley's The Spiders stars the African-American soldier Lt. Celicia Miller, and The Jain's Death is about Anuradha, a South Asian woman.
- I hear very good things about Carla Speed McNeil's Finder but haven't started it yet.
I don't much care about superhero comics so I'm leaving out Storm from X-Men, etc. Should I read Frank Miller's Martha Washington stuff? I should also sweep through my household's shelves, especially our three binders of indie stuff we've bought at MoCCA, to find more recommendation-worthy books and one-offs, especially by women and people of color.
(Random shout-out: Mel Chua's engineering education comics "What is Engineering?" and "What is Education?")
Crossposted to geekfeminism.org.
# 18 Jan 2012, 04:14PM: Ducts:
I've had two astonishing experiences in the last few days.
The first was watching the film Brazil for the first time. If I had watched that at 16 it would have changed the course of my life.
 The second is still ongoing. I am at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters today, and I was here when the word came back that the community had decided to globally black out English Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA, and I was here when we flipped the switch to do that and some music player started blasting "We're Not Gonna Take It."
This morning a stranger thanked me for working at the Foundation, as though thanking a soldier for her service in a war.
In Brazil we see everywhere ubiquitous ducts, maintained badly -- sometimes sabotaged -- by Central Services, as heroic volunteers make up the difference by secretly installing workarounds. I write this at my temporary desk, seeing the exposed HVAC ductwork on the third floor of a nondescript San Francisco office building. The more vital duct is the Ethernet cord connecting me to the Internet, to that communally maintained "series of tubes" that gives me work, community, free speech, and the collective wisdom of civilization.
Right now someone needs to save our ducts from sabotage, and the volunteers of the Wikimedia community have courageously decided to sacrifice a day of Wikipedia in the hopes of decisively ending a great threat. We Foundation workers have the privilege of helping.
I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Will you join me?
# 14 Jan 2012, 11:48AM: Five Things Make A Post:
In February and March, I will probably want to go to a lot of the Museum of the Moving Image's Muppet-related screenings, in case that piques your interest.
You can tell Leonard rewrote the introduction to MediaWiki's web service API because it now includes "Let's pick that URL apart to show how it works."
Words I used yesterday that I intend to use more often: "blunderbuss," "sarcophagus".
Why in the world is my Congressional representative, Carolyn Maloney, cosponsoring a bill to reduce public access to publicly funded science? I'm pretty angry and will be following up on this with her.
Because I saw David Costabile (Gale Boetticher) on the train this week, and because I think it's pretty, a montage of the scenes in Breaking Bad shot from an object's point of view (shovel, floor, Roomba, dryer...).
# 07 Jan 2012, 02:30PM: Lit On My Mind:
 Light fun: Charitable Getting by Sam Starbuck, free to download. It's a dramedy about the employees of a nonprofit and "a secretive blogger who might be one of his staff, a journalist determined to uncover who it is, and a client who not only doesn't want to pay their fee, but wants to sue [the firm] for telling the truth." I laughed out loud and was satisfyingly right in predicting the identity of the secret blogger.
More light fun: fanfic from the Yuletide challenge, 2011. A few of my favorite stories cover Casino Royale and Billy Elliot. Also check out Star Trek: Deep Space Nine heartwarmers "The Life That Is Waiting" and "In the Files".
I don't write fiction, but it's fun to read writing advice from authors because sometimes you get funny anecdotes. This is basically why I read Stephen King's On Writing memoir, and why I've been splashing through Jane Espenson's blog archives. At the Emmys:
...even the very end of the night was fun because there was this crush of people all waiting for their hired limos to come pick them up and everyone was in the same situation even though they might be, say, Vanessa Williams. Bizarrely egalitarian, the limo-waiting process.
(Jane Espenson majored in computer science at UC Berkeley, so I should add her to my list.)
For the same reason, I'm reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, whom I used to read in Salon. Restful & inspirational without being glurgy. (Example piece on her eating disorder.)
Book recommendation blast from the past: Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Dr. Anna Fels. Slate review, Broad Universe review. Fels points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. This book blew my mind in the best way when I read it a few years ago, and massively helped me guide my career development. It now informs my emphasis on explicit encouragement and mentorship of new MediaWiki volunteers.
# (1) 02 Jan 2012, 01:48PM: Self-Care, Sometimes On A Larger Scale:
I think some people I know might find Sam Starbuck's experience useful. He has social anxiety but wanted to leave the house more often, so he developed methods to cause himself to do so.The idea originally was just to get out more; not even necessarily to have more experiences, but not to spend every single night at home. There's nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but it wasn't what I wanted for me. So I developed the Adventur Programme.
I should say that I suspect the Adventur Programme would be different for everyone, because the key to doing it is finding something that will motivate you to actually follow through. Here's how I did it; the basic theme of all of this is to arrange things in such a way that making the decision to go isn't difficult....
Sam said that his plan
worked well. I think it's because it wasn't a resolution; it was a plan. Resolutions can be broken, and thus expose you to feelings of failure and despair. Whereas plans aren't broken. Plans are rescheduled for a later date. You haven't failed. You've just changed up your calendar a little.
I admire people and organizations that thoughtfully manage their sustainability. You can see Alexandra Erin develop this theme in her behind-the-scenes blogging; as a self-employed writer, she works as hard at developing her own infrastructure as she does at making fiction. For Sam, Alexandra, and me, the structure of a successful process must avoid causing feelings of failure and despair. We know that if we feel those, we'll stop. So we find patterns that suit our strengths and work around our weaknesses, and get us to our goals -- more adventures, more good fiction, better technical skills.
Maturity requires recognizing granite walls and finding workarounds, saying no to machismo.
We know from experience that counting only on unpaid volunteer effort to work on helping women in open technology and culture leads to burnout and inconsistency. So The Ada Initiative works as a nonprofit that pays two people's salaries to work fulltime on the issue. (I volunteer on their Advisory Board.)
In Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote of management, "How can I provide for this right thing to be always done?" Even when she's not there? Nightingale focuses on executive energy, attention, and putting the proper processes into place such that patients have the resources and quiet they need to get better.
However, there is a habit of mind that scorns all visible processes (and sees no value in formal communication containers such as meetings or performance reviews). I was talking about this with Ari yesterday, about (for example) software developers who think source control is needless overhead. I imagine some of these folks have suffered from their own personal resource curse, coasting through day-to-day tasks, the accreted cruft not yet salient, atherosclerosis not yet completely blocking the bottleneck.
Some have the useful skill of translating to them, getting across why hygiene is important in some particular case. Sometimes I can do this with analogies. Others use diagrams. But by the time I'm working with someone, it's usually too late to inculcate in them that habit of mind, a critical respect of social infrastructure.
(If you can, try never to work for someone who has this blind spot.)
Like Sam, I'm also working on sustainability and process improvement in my personal life. For me, it's cleaning and housework. What can I do to make it more likely that I'll do my fair share? I already knew that podcasts help. As of last week, I've discovered that I am way better at doing the dishes if I do them first thing in the morning. With enough tips and tricks, maybe I can adequately simulate a good flatmate.
# 31 Dec 2011, 11:17AM: Drinkin' One-Forties:
Oh, one more thing -- Leonard & I distilled my ten best microblog entries from 2011:
#captions error on TV yesterday: "We hold these trouts to be self evident"
You know that moment when you see a bright flash from the window through closed eyes, and know it's probably not a nuke, but still?
Procrustes was just Goldilocks with power.
Being a workaholic who works from home is like ... hmm, all these analogies are offensive.
"We have found that people of talent, ambition and accountability tend to stick together" - truth from http://amymlitt.com/who-we-are/
PLEASE CLIP YOUR NAMEBADGE FACING OUT. A personal appeal from Sumana Harihareswara of the Wikimedia Foundation. #wikimania
"Breaking Bad" in our house has been termed "the Arrested Development of despair," "evil Good Eats," & "Meth Mr. Wizard"
on getting lunch: "The thing about fixing your hunger is, it doesn't scale." "Depends how you fix it!" "I'll plant some corn." #osb11
Joke of the day: Who's Treebeard's favorite philosopher? Hume!
"Enjoy responsibly" is actually very difficult advice to take.
# (1) 31 Dec 2011, 09:02AM: This Year I Built A Wall Of Text:
Part of the pleasure of starting again is feeling the years and years of riding behind me -- the teenage bolting around like a lunatic and learning how to land on my feet, the years in my twenties when David drummed cadence into me -- coming up and helping, like a whale surfacing under a struggling swimmer. As if those years weren't wasted after all; as if all is not lost.
--yatima
In 2011 my past paid off splendidly. For more than a decade, sometimes without knowing it, I'd been investing in my domain knowledge, skills, credentials, and personal network. So when I started looking for project management and open source consulting work (starting in December 2010), I fairly quickly had as much work as I could handle. The job I have now is the most absorbing and rewarding I've ever had, excepting perhaps my two weeks of farm labor in the summer of 2007.
I worked thoroughly and consistently and busily in 2011. I saw my family, but I didn't see friends enough, and we didn't host enough parties. Then again I travelled a lot; there were months when I was away more than two weeks at a time. Barely exercised. Still married to Leonard, still childless. This year I started supporting him so he can concentrate on his fiction. We discovered Breaking Bad and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
I wrote about 6,814 emails, just under 500 public blog entries (here, Geek Feminism, Wikimedia Foundation blog), and probably 150 dents/tweets. Some of the best things I wrote in 2011:
- A half-hour standup comedy act, performed at various New York and DC locations, Community Leadership Summit, Open Source Bridge, Professional IT Community Conference, and the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit.
- "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, and tricking yourself"- if I succeed all the time, I'm not thinking big enough.
- The idea of MATERIAL VELOUR, COLOR UNKNOWN, which turned into a fifth of the "Imaginary Book Club" panel at WisCon.
- A review of Atul Gawande's Better - "The joke I make about my Indian parents is that it would have been okay for me to turn into a doctor, because a doctor is an engineer of the body."
- "All that school comes in handy sometimes!"
- A proposal that didn't get me the gig (managing R&D for a small startup, focusing on increasing their open source presence and making them leaders of a few useful but basically unmaintained projects; they've since incorporated some of my advice and seem to be doing well).
- "Three glimpses: Transformative work, public domain music, and ethics" - "It's amateurs, not big publishing companies, who are crowdsourcing free access to the sheet music of the Western heritage."
- "A Slightly Disjointed (Due To A Five-Day Cold) Musing On Open Source, Fear, Motivation, And Witnessing" - "I don't want to keep my friends blissfully ignorant of this. Is there a more loving human impulse than the joy of sharing? I'm sorry, C."
- A small part of the Joel on Coal parody (Julia Rios wrote most of it), and a project postmortem.
- The press release for GNOME 3.0.
- "It's always worthwhile remembering the history of technology."
- "A Loose Constellation of Thoughts on WikiLeaks" - "not countries but networks, like Al Qaeda and WikiLeaks. They use individual countries, the way one uses a coffeeshop that has a particularly lenient free wifi policy...."
- A description of how MediaWiki developers test, and of how we ought to. "But our codebase is so spaghetti & global-ridden that writing proper unit tests will be very difficult until we do some refactoring..."
- A 45-minute talk, "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes," for Open Source Bridge. Subheaders include "Why do projects fail?", "Evil list", "Suit-friendly presentations", "Lenses", and "Q&A about measuring intangibles".
- "'Put up or shut up'" - the double-edged sword of the do-ocratic norm, and how we sometimes use it to shut down uncomfortable conversations. The very people who need certain new policies, procedures and abstractions are least able and worst placed to implement them.
- "Google, gossip, and gamification: comparing and contrasting technical learning styles" - my tale of failure and return. How do you learn technical material and skills? Did your first attempt go awry, too?
- The 20-minute presentation "How to get what you want from MediaWiki developers" at Wikimania.
- A description of how Launchpad developers review each others' code. "Code reviewing is not primarily a gate to keep bugs out of code, but a social step, to get a second set of eyes on code, and to spread knowledge around."
- "Do you ever make up stories about the mushrooms as you move them around?"
- "Everybody's Doing It: Some Hackathon Tips".
- A writeup of a Wikimedia hackathon.
- Probably hundreds of messages to the Wikimedia developers' mailing list.
- "Practices, And Practice" - "so the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working.... you are not alone."
- Hundreds of private blog entries in the accountability group blog. I am so grateful for this small community that helps me keep balanced and keep going.
Happy New Year.
# (8) 27 Dec 2011, 12:18PM: Confidence Interval:
I enjoyed having the apartment to myself for a week while Leonard visited his blood family (why is it easier to clean when I have the house to myself? Why?!), but of course I also enjoy his return. After all, I need someone else to admire these clean countertops! And yesterday he and I talked about what's implausible or frustrating about Jurassic Park (the film), which I had watched afresh on Sunday.
For contrast: the year before Jurassic Park came out, all across the US television screens flickered and blared with "Rascals", a cute and fun episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that does UTTERLY AND WHOLLY IMPLAUSIBLE things with biology. We watched it again yesterday and Leonard pointed out that its science is about as bad as (and arguably contradicts!) that in "Similitude" (ENT). Argh argh argh.
Compare Jurassic Park, which barely ripples the suspension of disbelief.
 - Leonard notes that the scientists shouldn't have used frog DNA to fill in the gaps, but rather some kind of avian DNA. Yes, but I'm willing to be technobabbled out of that.
- More troublingly (Leonard read an article about this once) -- could you really get enough intact DNA out of the stomachs of millions-years-old mosquitoes? Probably not; you'd need to find a lot of mosquitoes, and I imagine some anaerobic digestive processes would continue even after amber encasement, denaturing the proteins and so on. Still, I am (possibly too leniently) rather unbothered by this -- my impression is that we keep discovering new places DNA's been stashed, and if it's not mosquito bellies, it's, I dunno, the La Brea tar pits or peat bogs or something.
- The engineering management failure is plausible, but only if the managers don't know how to manage large engineering projects and mitigate risk properly. Well, Hammond is a fantastic user interface designer who tried to do the software and hardware sides on the cheap. "Spared no expense" only applies to the user-facing bits. And he doesn't listen to criticism. Annoyingly plausible.
- The glimpses of software that we get are basically fine, in my opinion.
Yes, I am not exactly pioneering the field of scifi or media criticism by going over the plausibility of this very-well-known artifact from 1993. But if I'd asked myself last week, "What will have more implausibilities? A TNG episode from 1992 or a big-budget Hollywood action thriller from 1993?" I would not have predicted this case. A reminder not to be complacent.
I also appreciate Leonard's presence because I can occasionally ask him to diagnose a Python error (e.g., "TypeError: 'type' object is not subscriptable"). After years of trying to self-teach with books and tutorials and scratch-my-own-itch projects and lectures and lecture videos, I find that the Boston Python Workshop, CodingBat, and Python Challenge were the dance partners I needed. Yesterday I used a dictionary data type to help solve a problem! And it worked! But I'll write more about this on Geek Feminism. Anyway, hence the "recursion" half of the "recursion dinosaur" graphic.
# 24 Dec 2011, 01:02PM: Discovering An Origin:
Yesterday I helped a bit with a Dreamwidth code tour. Every time Dreamwidth deploys a new update to the site, someone writes up explanations of what all the new bits are. Not just a summary of the big changes, but a sentence or a paragraph about every bugfix and improvement. Basically, imagine if release notes had explanations like this summary by ghoti:
Bug 4102: Checkboxes to retain relationships when renaming have disappeared
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: ![[staff profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png) denise and fu
Description: So when you rename your account, you're supposed to get checkboxes that keep your access list, filters, and stuff like that during the rename. Unfortunately those checkboxen had disappeared. This shouldn't happen anymore. If you got caught in this bug, please tell denise or fu.
for every bug. Then the code tour gets posted in the Dreamwidth Development community, and linked to from general Dreamwidth news posts. This effectively tells customers where their money's gone, showcases the work of volunteers, and provides examples for people who had been thinking of getting involved in bugfixing (a form of babydev-bait). I fear that the Wikimedia development pace is too high and its community size is too large to make this particular method effective for us, but I'm going to keep thinking about ways we could modify this tactic to achieve those goals for us.
I wrote the summaries of bugs 3186 & 3087, which took maybe ten or fifteen minutes from start to finish. It was fun to flex that muscle, remembering how to distill and translate and explain:
Most support requests are visible to everyone, so everyone can help answer them. For privacy, only Dreamwidth staff and trusted volunteers can see support requests in certain categories, like Account Payments issues or Terms of Service violations. But that wasn't clear to regular users on the support ticket submission page. Now it is, because there are asterisks marking those categories.
I remembered writing functional specifications as a project manager, and reading technical specs and translating them into "what this means for your weekend." I thought about my eventual goal of managing a product, a role that requires someone to think from logistical, marketing, design, financial, and technical perspectives.
Then this morning I picked up A Case of Need by Michael Crichton. He wrote it as a young doctor, under the pseudonym "Jeffery Hudson."
I cut a slice of the white lump and quick-froze it. There was only one way to be certain if the mass was benign or malignant, and that was to check it under the microscope. Quick-freezing the tissue allowed a thin section to be rapidly prepared. Normally, to make a microscope slide, you had to dunk your stuff into six or seven baths; it took at least six hours, sometimes days. The surgeons couldn't wait.
The key context you need to understand the emotional valence of the detail, always keeping the reader aware of what's normal and what's a surprise, what's the best practice and what shortcuts people end up taking. Crichton would have written that summary of the private category marking exactly as I did.
So -- just as I learned my long-distance mentorship skills from Beverly Cleary in Dear Mr. Henshaw, I learned my expository skill from Michael Crichton. Embarrassing, given what Crichton got up to in his later years, but I'll take my skill where I can get it.
(If I were smarter I could make a nice comparison among George Orwell, Alan Furst, Michael Crichton, and Ellen Ullman.)
(By the way, someone quoted from that A Case of Need passage in a comment in an FCC filing.)
# 23 Dec 2011, 12:32PM: Diligence And Joy:
I get a different kind of understanding, now, out of Paul Ford's "Cleaning My Room," ten years later. When I reread it, I flash back to my old messy apartment in Berkeley, where I sat as I absorbed it the first time. I'm years older than Ford was when he wrote it. I haven't quite been through the journey he experienced, but I've tasted some of the other side. It pairs with "Until the Water Boils."
# 14 Dec 2011, 05:39PM: Low-rent Thomas Friedman:
I am on my couch in New York City. My Dutch colleague, who also works from home, is waiting with me on the conference call. We're waiting for the San Francisco folks to show up for the call. I can hear that he's watching a video of us doing karaoke together in November, in Mumbai. He was singing Aqua's "Barbie Girl".
# 11 Dec 2011, 11:07AM: Constellation Games:
First contact isn't all fun and games.
Ariel Blum is pushing thirty and doesn't have much to show for it. His computer programming skills are producing nothing but pony-themed video games for little girls. His love life is a slow-motion train wreck, and whenever he tries to make something of his life, he finds himself back on the couch, replaying the games of his youth.
Then the aliens show up.
Out of the sky comes the Constellation: a swarm of anarchist anthropologists, exploring our seas, cataloguing our plants, editing our wikis and eating our Twinkies. No one knows how to respond--except for nerds like Ariel who've been reading, role-playing and wargaming first-contact scenarios their entire lives. Ariel sees the aliens' computers, and he knows that wherever there are computers, there are video games.
Ariel just wants to start a business translating alien games so they can be played on human computers. But a simple cultural exchange turns up ancient secrets, government conspiracies, and unconventional anthropology techniques that threaten humanity as we know it. If Ariel wants his species to have a future, he's going to have to take the step that nothing on Earth could make him take.
He'll have to grow up.
Constellation Games is a novel by my spouse, Leonard Richardson. You can read the first two chapters for free. It's now available for purchase as a serial -- for USD$5, total, you'll get a chapter in your email every week. If you pay a little more, you'll get a print paperback, bonus stories, a phrasebook, and so on. And for free, anyone can read the author's commentary, Twitter feed, &c.
This is a great book. I love it. Oh, and for all of December, Leonard's publisher is running a give-one-get-one special. So I encourage you to read those sample chapters and I hope you'll decide to subscribe.
# (5) 10 Dec 2011, 01:17AM: Analogies:
From some recent explanations of software stuff to nontechnical folks:
Suites like Windows/IIS or LAMP go together the way everything at IKEA matches anything else you buy at IKEA.
Source control is like a wiki.
Virtualization is like Inception.
The IPv4 address shortage, and the switch to IPv6, is like when they had to make new US area codes when we were running out of phone numbers.
Using an interpreted language is like a conversation over instant messenger; compiled languages act more like correspondence over email.
Architecting up-front (waterfall) is good for when you are pretty sure what you want, as when you are hungry and want lunch. You have been hungry many times before and know food in lunch form will work to fix this. You do not need to reimagine the nature of food, hunger, and digestion.
We want people to make stuff that works with our API the way that Apple likes people making iPod accessories.
A database is like a library.
Working on software with other people is like living in a house together. Making your changes in trunk is like moving the shoes from the foyer to the hall closet a little at a time, and (during the changeover) leaving a few pairs out where your housemates will trip over them. In contrast, saving your changes in a branch to merge later, when your change is complete, is like moving all the shoes at once. (Better explanation.)
I beseech you: if you are going to nitpick these, please be funny.
# (1) 09 Dec 2011, 03:47PM: Where All Happiness Is Contained:
The song in my head right now is Pete Seeger's version of "Business" (hear a sample at Smithsonian Folkways). It's from an English translation of a French poem by Guillevic -- I should look up the original.
Image in my head: when I pour hot water over a used herbal tea bag to make a second cup, the air in the bag instantly heats and inflates, buoying the bag atop the rising water.
# (1) 06 Dec 2011, 11:56AM: I Watched NBC On Thursday Nights In The Nineties:
Guy in a bar told me that George Clooney & Noah Wyle are competing to play Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic.
- So anyone from ER has a shot? Anthony Edwards, Sherry Stringfield... hold on, John Stamos was in ER? They got Thandie Newton & John Leguizamo? Well, a lot happens in 15 seasons.
- Shouldn't Noah be concentrating on his upcoming fanfilm, John Carter (Not) Of Mars?
# 04 Dec 2011, 08:18AM: Asymptomatic, Asymptotic:
Last night I gave Leonard some alone time to work on a Constellation Games bonus story. I went to Ward III, a Manhattan bar that does bespoke cocktails. They have a menu of predesigned cocktails as well, but if you tell them, "I would love something bubbly with basil and lemon," they think about it and figure something out. I especially appreciate that they are perfectly fine with making interesting nonalcoholic drinks. I don't know a better place to get a bespoke mocktail.
 While there, I read a bit of Making Software. One of its editors also cowrote "Empirical Software Engineering: As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up" in the latest American Scientist, in case you want a taste of his approach. We can now do metasurveys and overviews of existing research into software development, and the science says:
Pair programmers tend to produce code that is easier to understand, and they do so with higher morale. Their productivity may fall initially as the programmers adjust to the new work style, but productivity recovers and often surpasses its initial level as programmer teams acquire experience....
 Large meta-analyses and further studies by Hannay and others conclude that a programmer’s personality is not a strong predictor of performance. The people who swear by their beliefs about personality and programmer success have now been given reason to assess their position critically, along with methodological support for doing so....
....the distinctions between the two worlds are often illusory. There are cathedrals in the open-source sphere and bazaars in the closed-source. Similar social and technical trends can be documented in both.... Schryen and Rich sorted the packages they studied within categories such as open- and closed-source, application type (operating system, web server, web browser and so on), and structured or loose organization. They found that security vulnerabilities were equally severe for both open- and closed-source systems, and they further found that patching behavior did not align with an open–versus-closed source divide. In fact, they were able to show that application type is a much better determinant of vulnerability and response to security issues, and that patching behavior is directed by organizational policy without any correlation to the organizational structure that produced the software.
 I read about software engineering research while sitting at the bar, over lemon-lime-and-bitters and devilled eggs served with slices of jalapeño. I always love getting to watch people who are good at their jobs, and the craftsmen at Ward III have a particularly explicitly collaborative style with their customers. One of them, Michael J. Neff, blogs at Serious Eats about cocktails and tending bar. He writes thoughtfully about the use of sugar, free-pouring versus using jiggers to measure, why Californians like us find hurricanes so unsettling ("I tend to think natural disasters should be short, violent, and most of all, unannounced."), and the downside of cocktail nostalgia.
Much of the current cocktail trend is based on nostalgia, and it is difficult to say it, but many cocktails that we now call "forgotten classics" are forgotten for a reason. They have the shine of history, and we're told we are supposed to love them, but they're too sweet, they lack balance, and they kind of suck....
...none of us invented the cocktail. Whatever we create now is a collaboration between those who make spirits, those who make cocktails, and those who imbibe them. If we leave behind the drinker, we leave behind the only people who can tell us what works. None of us make cocktails in a vacuum.
No matter what field you're in, it can be hard to hear criticism. It can be hard to switch habits in response to new data, from your customer or from research. But that's what learning is. Disequilibrium -- surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations -- will always happen. Taking that opportunity to move away from a local maximum towards a global maximum is up to me.
# 02 Dec 2011, 07:59AM: Professional Education:
Yesterday I bought and read Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer because I remembered liking the blog. Strange. I don't usually like wince humor, but the book went pretty fast and balanced out the narrator's ambition and arrogance with quiet subtext. I have recently been letting work swallow up my life, so it was nice to sit on the couch next to Leonard and read a book for a while, even if it was a book about someone who lets work swallow up his life.
Now reading Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It. I swing between utterly loving this book and needing to take a nap.
Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which are true, and which are merely wishful thinking? In Making Software, leading researchers and practitioners present chapter-length summaries of key empirical findings in software engineering...
One of the editors is Greg Wilson, the Software Carpentry dude who wants to teach scientists basic software engineering skills -- talk about doing the Lord's work! I heard about Software Carpentry via Mary Gardiner's "Changing the World with Python" talk (transcript).
Speaking of Python, I'll be in Boston the weekend of December 17th to attend a project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends. There are still 7 slots left, in case you want to join me. I fear that I'm in that bleh spot, not an utter novice but still too unskilled to make Python do what I want, so here's hoping the weekend gets me over that hump.
# 29 Nov 2011, 09:39AM: Practices, And Practice:
A few months ago, I was talking with one of MediaWiki's summer interns in our IRC chatroom. He confessed that he had procrastinated on the work for his project and was rushing to finish it before the deadline. We had a chat that he thought other people might also find useful, in thinking about work habits and discipline.
I asked this Google Summer of Code student, do you know what caused the delays, so that you can account for them in future projects? and he replied, to be honest, procrastination & laziness. I know it's very shameful. I try many times to come out of this vicious circle but keep falling in it again and again.
 I asked him whether he knew what works to combat his own procrastination and laziness. The most important thing is acknowledging one's problems and then fighting them. For example, for me, I have a suite of tactics that I use to combat my laziness & procrastination. What has worked, and what hasn't worked? Well, for me, for example, merely promising something to myself and making deadlines for myself doesn't help. But setting up a meeting with a peer to sprint -- even if we're working on completely different things! -- or promising a peer or a mentor that I will give them something to review by $time or $date helps.
He said, "motivation works but only for some time."
I replied: "what do you mean by 'motivation'? Merely telling yourself to increase your willpower? I think for most people that is unsustainable."
Another woman agreed with me: "motivation only works if it's a core part of you (and even then for me it's more the worry that other people will find me to not have that quality)." I sympathized with her.
I continued with more tips. For example, I also try to set very small TODO lists each day, because I find that the most important thing is getting started, and avoiding feeling intimidated and overwhelmed. Then once I have the momentum of a little work under my belt, the energy and interest of the work itself keeps me going and then I accomplish a lot.
 "So, I know this advice is coming a little too late for you to use it for GSoC, but an accountability buddy program is great," I told him. If he hadn't had daily deliverables due to his mentor during GSoC, then the next time he could try that -- or a private accountability group blog with you & two friends, posting each day what you did, what you aim to do, how long it'll take, and auditing yourself. Instead of budgeting for 8 hours of work each day, I budget tasks that will take at most 6 hours, because I know other random stuff will come in and need doing urgently, and some tasks may take longer than I've estimated. This also helps on the "less intimidating TODO list" front.
We also discussed education; many colleges teach mostly theory, and a student who wants practice has to find it on her own. I said that there is always that balance of theory & implementation/practice. I told him that I wish I had been more brave and bold about experimentation when I was in college. It's just software; if it breaks then you can fix it. I was too timid. I pointed him to a Geek Feminism post of mine for some insight on my education regrets and hopes.
And, on the improvement that comes from working in a different environment, I gave an example: "Friday, I was having trouble doing work while sitting on the couch, so I sat on the floor with my back to the couch, and that helped! just a tiny change of position signalled to my unconscious that it was not relaxation time. For me, it can be as little as a different chair in the same room."
He was pretty grateful.
Him: now i know the power of honest revelations, i was looking for this from so long!
Me: so the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working. No learning is wasted. Take this for next time.
Him: sumanah: i would shower a million thanks if i could, you have striked the very core problem of mine n gave me very practical solution
Me: the best thanks you can give me is to continue to contribute to Wikimedia and to tell your friends these tips as well
Him: sumanah: yes, I will keep contributing to the best of my abilities
Me: Yay!
...
Him: now, I really feel that I am not the loner who does all that stuff!
Me: you are not alone.
Him: you should also blog a few lines like the tip you told me, it would help millions
Me: I will strongly consider that. Thanks.
I've edited the original log for easier legibility.
A line that others have found useful is "so the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working."
But the best part of that conversation, for me, was being able to tell someone, "you are not alone." That always makes a red-letter day.
# (2) 27 Nov 2011, 04:56PM: Milk Stout, Vanilla Porter:
Leonard and I both spend most of our time at the apartment these days, me working for the Wikimedia Foundation, him working on Constellation Games, his science fiction novel, launching Tuesday. (The novel's done, but he's been working on the bonus stories, Twitter feeds, and so on.) So we have to take care to give each other some regular alone time in the apartment. Yesterday he left for several hours, and today I did.
I read the end of a Kim Stanley Robinson collection, first in a park and then over beer and fries at a tavern. I liked the funny stories, like "Escape from Kathmandu" and "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars" and "Zürich," and upon a second reading still found the end of "A History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" kind of inexplicable. I read "The Lucky Strike" and "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions" for the second time and loved them all over again. Sensible people sweating out hard choices, that's KSR. Sometimes they find courage, sometimes they don't. Math, history, geology, biology, mining, astrophysics, poetry, music (the best fiction about classical music I've ever read), cleaning, archaeology -- all the disciplines get this gentle, straightforward, clear attention. He's funnier than Vernor Vinge, but Vinge talks about software more, and I'm a sucker for that. And I think Vinge writes about more kinds of characters.
Home, and the electric light on, because it gets dark at freaking four-thirty now. After I hit Post, some together time with Leonard, because we need that too.
# (1) 27 Nov 2011, 07:11AM: Intuition and Property:
From and following conversation with Finn back in the winter, and "Slapdash Thoughts On Real Estate" two years ago:
I told Finn that Locke had posited three ways to legitimately acquire land-style property. "Incidentally, the least-Dugg Cracked.com list ever," he japed.
- No one owns it right now and you plop yourself down on it, leaving as much and as good for others
- Someone else legitimately has it and you consensually acquire it from them
- Someone else had it and is leaving it completely fallow; you mix your labor with it and squat and homestead for a while
This makes intuitive sense to a 21st century USian. For one thing, we hate waste and love utility. And this helps understand why one intuitive reaction to the Sita Sings the Blues copyright story is "but those songs were so old and no one was using them"!
But when you look at the four kinds of intellectual property, consider how we feel proprietary about the important people and things in our life. What are your intuitions, and how do they align with the particular kinds of ownership that you can get with various kinds of IP? When you think about folk copyright, what other norms does that remind you of?
We make all these analogies, we free culture folk, as do our adversaries. This is rather lazy and Sapir-Whorf of me, I never even seriously read any George Lakoff, but there seriously are metaphors we live by, and to win the hearts and minds of our citizenry we must activate the right metaphors as we market our ideas. And I'm enough of an outlier that I don't know my neighbors' intuitions; my contrarian heart keeps me guessing. I should read the research, of course, Biella Coleman and Rose White and James Grimmelmann, all the thinkers to whom I am a mere bikeshedder.
Perhaps we are more into a protocol for ensuring everyone's doing the same thing than we are into that thing itself.
# (1) 26 Nov 2011, 10:41AM: A Sample Of My Stand-Up:
Geeky Stand-up Comedy from Heiko V. on Vimeo. Sumana's Stand Up Comedy on the second day of the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2011.
Unfortunately the recording died half way through the video...
Thanks to Heiko for recording this. It's 14:28. There's an odd synchronization problem with the audio and the video. Also this is unpracticed. I often go to unconferences, realize I may as well do some nerdy stand-up, and then do it with like fifteen minutes' rememorizing/practice. The answer is to develop new material that excites me more.
# (6) 26 Nov 2011, 07:14AM: Imagination:
I enjoyed the new Muppet movie thoroughly. I have, basically, only two substantial criticisms. One is the fact that nearly all the female characters are defined by their relationships with men. The second is more interesting.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Well, I'm not sure it's a spoiler for a Muppet movie to tell you that they have to put on a show to raise the money to save a theater. Rich guy has them over a barrel, wants to bulldoze their old theater to drill for oil. They need to raise ten million dollars to buy it back from him.
One theatrical regret of my life is that I had tickets to see Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America and then forgot to go, and missed it. (Ever since then: cell phone alarms.) Daisey argues that US theatrical companies care too much about buildings and administration, and that they should instead focus on paying and sustaining actors. I had hoped, towards the end of the film, when it looks like our Muppets have lost their building and their trademarked name, that this was the kind of point they would make. Kermit even edges close to this idea, telling his team that it's not their name or their building that matters, it's each other.
It's the wine that matters and not the bottle.
And then the movie steps away from that, and tens of thousands of fans are cheering Muppets who thought they'd been forgotten, and the rich guy has a change of heart and turns generous (kind of like the problem with the end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where the only reason Smith wins is that the corrupt Senator gives in and confesses all). So they get their building and name back.
But -- and I know I'm asking a lot of a Hollywood franchise, but this one has glimmers of intelligence -- wouldn't it have been a lot more interesting if they'd gone another way? If they got back on the bus and started bringing live theater to cities and towns all across the map? If they stopped treating Muppet diasporas as a failure and started acknowledging them as a natural part of the team's lifecycle, and enabled each other to learn, grow, change, and make great art while apart? If they took Walter as an example and started consciously teaching and recruiting young newbies? What else could they do with that ten million dollars?
Argh, I know, I know, I am pushing fruitlessly against the sitcom-esque constraints of a franchise film. The equilibrium must be restored and nothing architectural can ever change. Don't get me wrong -- I loved this film, it left me with a huge face-aching smile on my face, and it's sweet and funny and clever. But I came to it not seeking reassurance that old bonds and relations will endure and prevail. I came to it with the Mountain Goats' "The Young Thousands" in my head.
....The things that you've got coming will consume you
There's someone waiting out there in an alley with a chain
....The things that you've got coming will do things that you're afraid to
There is someone waiting out there with a mouthful of surprises
....There must be diamonds somewhere in a place that stinks this bad
There are brighter things than diamonds coming down the line
Every skeleton, every institution has a natural shelf life. It takes maturity to say, "There have been enough Star Trek stories. Let it end." And if I shun all the scary change that comes down the line, I'll miss the unimaginably glorious surprises as well.
And this is also why we make transformative work -- the fanfic, the vids, the filks and software. So, if someone wants to point me to awesome Muppet diaspora fic, I'll totally read it.
# 25 Nov 2011, 03:41PM: On My Mind:
I remember, during an election debate, Al Gore quoting the line, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" from Matthew. There's a similar Gibran line, "Work is love made visible."
It's important where you put your time. It's important to take care of your responsibilities, including yourself.
# 23 Nov 2011, 12:10PM: Muppet Fanfic:
"Tomorrow Is Waiting" by Holli Mintzer.
If you want the truth, it happened because Anji was feeling lazy. Her AI class wasn't all that interesting, nor was it a field she wanted a career in, so there wasn't any reason she could see for trying especially hard. So she came up with a project that didn't look like too much work, and she picked what looked like the easiest way of doing it. Things just got a little out of hand, after that....
Sweet and moving and happy-making.
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