Yesterday, my office-mate told a story about the struggle with stuff. Her house had a lot of clutter. She was sick of it. So she cleared stuff up. She got stuff organized. She gave stuff away. She discarded stuff. There was that moment of triumph when she realized she could see the floor. A while later, she went up to her son's room. There were boxes in there, boxes full of stuff. Apparently, her task was more Sisyphean than she had realized.

Where had all of these boxes come from? Her ex-husband had heard that she'd cleared some space in her house--so he'd sent over some stuff from his house to store. I immediately thought about my teeny-tiny apartment, which is bursting at the seams with stuff. People look at me funny when I say I don't have room for a TV in my apartment, like I'm saying something philisophical about TV or judgemental about mass media or... whatever. These people have not seen my apartment. People who have seen my apartment just nod in agreement. I have too much stuff for my apartment. So when I heard my office-mate's story, I thought it would be great to have an ex-wife. I could box up all of my useless crap and send it to her. That would be awesome. (Though, on later reflection, I figured out that the process of acquiring an ex-wife is even more painful than dealing with a storage company, so never mind that idea.)

Anyhow, people have a bunch of physical possessions. Physical possessions are a hassle, so probably we can learn something about ourselves by looking at which physical possessions we think are worth hanging onto. That's the basis of Snoop. It's about personality, what your stuff says about your personality, and your stuff doesn't say about your personality but people will draw conclusions so watch yourself. It's not just about physical possessions--it's also about how you carry yourself, how you interact with people.

This book is about figuring out someone's personality by looking at their stuff and outward appearance. What can you figure out about someone by browsing their bookshelf? By watching them walk? By looking at their Facebook page? (And what can you figure out by looking at their homepage (other than that they were narcissicistic enough to set up a home page in the first place)?) What can you find out by rooting through their trash?

You probably already have some good ideas what you can figure out--and some misconceptions. This book is about some psychologists who studied correlations between personalities and stuff.

They like the Big Five (a.k.a. "OCEAN") measure of personality--instead of clustering folks into types, it attempts to measure five aspects of personality. (I'm a O5-C74-E12-A32-N9 Big Five!!, at least according to one on-line personality quiz.)

Don't try to draw too many conclusions from one object; look for the big picture. If you see that someone has some organizational aid, don't assume that they're organized--check to see that they're using it correctly. Sometimes someone will set out one item that they hope will be noticed; that item might reflect their personality or it might not. Sometimes someone will have some item that catches your eye because it seems like a clue to their personality--but it's an outlier; maybe a gift, maybe something they picked up for someone else; maybe something that's just plain unusual for them.

When trying to judge someone's personality based upon their bearing, how they present themselves: You probably can't figure out Open-ness, though people try based on refined appearance, friendly expression, and calm speaking. If you want to know if someone is conscientious, see if they dress formally; don't look for plain dress, nor a controlled sitting posture, nor calm speech. You can figure out if someone's extraverted based on how they carry themselves. To know if someone's agreeable, see if they have a friendly expression, but don't rely on lots of smiling. You probably can't judge someone's neuroticism based on features you might think would work: grumpy expression, stiff gait, unpleasant voice; you can get a hint that they're neurotic if they wear dark clothes.

When trying to judge someone's personality based upon their living space. For open-ness, look for some unusual objects, look for a variety of reading material. To know if they're conscientious, look for organization, neatness, and comfort. (You might not have thought to look for comfort.) Don't try to figure out extraversion or agreeableness. When judging neuroticism, ignore stale air, but do look out for inspirational posters.

To guess someone's open-ness, look at their web presence, their office, the variety of their music tastes. To guess someone's conscientiousness, look at their website vs their Facebook profile--Facebook guides you away from a cluttered look; look at living space or how they carry themselves in a short meeting. For extraversion, check the Facebook profile or (duh) watch to see how they interact with people. For agreeableness--maybe you're not going to get a strong indicator. For neuroticism, look at living space, personal web site, or how they interact socially.

This last weekend, I pitched in for a playtest of MSPH12 "Jeopardy!". These puzzle-solving endeavors have wonderful moments. Solving puzzles in a team environment--it's very satisfying when my skills complement someone else's and we solve a puzzle quickly by playing off each others' strengths.

I tell people about this stuff, and they're interested at first, until I 'fess up that it's not all about shining flashlights at carefully-constructed paper models of the Las Vegas skyline--it's mostly sitting, thinking, and scritching little notes. It ain't rock and roll, though in conversation I probably paint it exciting.

Of course, I'm thinking about a book as I write this. I'm thinking about Crypto, about another activity full of secret messages.

This book is by Steven Levy and thus has a faux rock-n-roll rebel subtitle: "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." And there's an awful passage that reminds me of some of Levy's worst writing:

Profane, cranky, and totally in tune with the digital hip-hop of Internet rhythm, they were cryptographers with an attitude.

Argh. Even if the Internet had a rhythm and even if "digital hip-hop" described that rhythm, I don't think the cryptographers could be described as... arrgh. Oh, and he kinda gives partial explanations of some crypto techniques, explanations so incomplete that they're less help than nothing. Arggh, aiyee.

But

But

But if you can get past that, this is a pretty well-researched history. Levy talked with plenty of cryptographers and other figures. And he shows both sides--I still think that the Clipper Chip was a bad idea, and maybe I still can't respect Al Gore for backing it--but I can kinda see how he got roped into supporting it; maybe I can see how well-paved his hell-bound road was.

I got an idea of the personalities of Diffie, Rivest, and some other big names. The story of the coining of "cypherpunks" is in here. There are plenty of good anecdotes. All in all, a worthwhile piece of work.

I have a new phone and a new phone number to go with it: 1 415 868 4629. So I updated the Larry Hosken Contact Info page and there was much rejoicing.

I also have a Hello Kitty bag to hold the phone, all rigged up on a belt clip. It does not look as cool as it sounds from the verbal description; and the verbal description is already pretty dorky. You have been warned.

How to get programmers to get along together. Attempts to use psychology to design easier-to-use computer language features. Discussion of which is better for your organization's culture: batch processing of punch cards or time-sharing. Ahem, yes, that's right, I said "punch cards or time-sharing." This book is from 1971. Wow, that's even older than Peopleware. So it's interesting, but in sorta the same way as when you're reading Knuth and you're thinking "Wow, this book is so influential, I'm gonna learn a lot and--wha hey why is he talking about this weird non-Intel architecture OMG did people really argue about what the correct size for a byte is, I mean, c'mon?!?" Apparently, time-sharing was a not-unmixed blessing. If you get a bunch of geeks waiting in line to turn in their punch cards, sometimes they talk about useful stuff.

I guess as long as I'm linking to a cafe, I should link to the place where I pick up coffee on weekend mornings: Coffee to the People. I claim that it is awesome. It's a cafe at Haight on Masonic. There are tables, sofas, books, boardgames. There are coffee drinks, pastries, and some other bits of food that don't require too much prep: bagels, warmed-up quiche, etc. I usually get a depth charge and that depth charge usually keeps me awake without sending me into a clench-jawed frenzy. I.e., efficacious but not harmful. I try to get there early in the morning, before poseurs, hipsters, and fashionistas descend upon the neighborhood, cafe, and mood. Early in the morning, there might be grizzled political commentators, street people, and hippies, but nothing you can't handle. I drink coffee, maybe pick at a scone, sit, read, and wait for wakefulness to return.

Not to be confused with the People's Cafe. That place concentrates more on food, sandwiches and such. That's all well and good, but I like Coffee to the People better.

I work for a large company. Thus, there are "leadership seminars" with "team-building exercises." I attended one of those. I was confessing this to some friends on Saturday, and one of them knew exactly what I meant; he asked, "Were there ropes to climb, among trees?" Yes, yes there were. The ropes didn't teach me much about leadership or people skills or teams. Why not? Because belayed rope-climbing is too similar to belayed rock-climbing. The beginner's lesson of rock climbing which is pertinent to leadership/people/teams is: Once you learn that you can trust your belayer, you make rapid progress by putting your energy into climbing instead of clinging. Thanks to Chuck Groom, I'd already learned that. So the ropes were fun but... Well, I didn't learn much there. For more insights on people, I guess I'll keep talking to them. And reading. E.g., I got around to reading Peopleware.

This book is a classic, by which I mean you've already heard most of what it has to say about managing software development. You've heard it second-hand. Reading the book itself is a little strange. Parts of it make little sense unless you drag up history, let your brain nestle into an old mindset.

Why does the book rail against Productivity? Why does it equate productivity with burnout and overtime? Doesn't improving producitivity mean setting up better tools and processes so that people can work more efficiently? Well... back in the day, "Productivity" meant that folks should work longer hours. Japanese car companies were out-producing American car companies. American executives went to visit Japanese executives and noticed that Japanese office workers stayed in the office long hours. (They didn't notice that Japanese assembly line workers were better trained, were encouraged to improve processes, and... Ahem, anyhow.) They came back and said that we should all work harder. Never mind that those Japanese sararimen weren't getting much done. Thus, Peopleware pointed out that short-term benefits from working long hours were offset by folks burning out--something that seems pretty obvious in hindsight, but perhaps seemed less obvious at the time.

They pointed out that projects that operate without time estimates are the most productive.

They pointed out that programmers need to focus and can do so best in offices with doors that close. They spoke out against distractions. In hindsight, I think they overstated the value of closed offices--over-emphasizing bursts of focused work vs. encouraging folks to talk to each other and exchange ideas--at the time, cubicle-bound programmers were subject to plenty of distractions that weren't useful conversations with coworkers.

They talked about how to prevent folks from having their conversation broken by the telephone. People still used voice communication back then. It was sort of like text-messaging, only... Oh, never mind. You kids today will never understand how rough we had it back then.

They talk about Christopher Alexander, the Design Pattern guy. Back when Design Patterns were architecture architecture instead of software architecture. I wonder if this book is what introduced so many software weenies to design patterns.

They talk about Teams, about complementary skills, about people learning to work with each other. Back in the day, did managers feel like workers were interchangeable? I don't know. There's a bulleted list for team formation.

• Make a cult of quality.
• Provide lots of satisfying closure.
• Build a sense of eliteness.
• Allow and encourage heterogeneity.
• Preserve and protect successful teams.
• Provide strategic but not tactical direction.

These seem like things that most of my managers have tried to do. Like I said, you've probably seen most of what this book has to say, you've picked it up second-hand.

Wow, it's the site's 13000000th hit. (Sort of. Actually, it probably passed 13000000 a while back. I skipped counting a bunch of hits (most of them?) during October-November. Anyhow.)

124.185.38.69 - - [18/Jan/2009:05:48:16 -0400] "GET /departures/Seattle/11/03623_al_mary_veronica_tom_table_tm.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 4497 "http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/departures/Seattle/11/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath"

Let's see, what's going on here? Someone viewed the travelog of that road trip to Vancouver that Tom Lester and I took four years ago when we were both between jobs. That page shows a bunch of "thumbnail" graphics--small versions of large photos. Here, the browser is fetching one of those thumbnails, specifically a photo from Veronica & Patrick's place up at the Sixes River in Oregon--in the photo, Patrick's parents and Veronica are sitting around the kitchen table.

The IP address suggests that the user is a customer of Bigpond, an ISP service run by Telstra in Australia. Assuming that Bigpond uses a sensible naming convention, I'm guessing this customer is in Queensland:

$ dig -x 124.185.38.69
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
69.38.185.124.in-addr.arpa. 85476 IN PTR CPE-124-185-38-69.qld.bigpond.net.au.

"qld" seems like an abbreviation for Queensland, doesn't it?

Looking at previous hits for that same IP address (presumably the same user), we can see loading lots more thumbnails... Ah, and here's where they loaded the page itself:

124.185.38.69 - - [18/Jan/2009:05:48:14 -0400] "GET /departures/Seattle/11/ HTTP /1.1" 200 45255 "http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=recommended+road+trip+between+LA+and+Vancouver&spell=1" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath.1)"

I guess they arrived at the page after doing a Google search for road trip recommendations from L.A. to Vancouver. Dang, Tom and I started a ways north of L.A. I sure hope that that Australian nevertheless leaves some slack touristy-time between L.A. and S.F. There's plenty of stuff to see there.

It's a novel by Andrea Barrett, but it's not about scientists or even lab assistants. Who knew that Barrett wrote about anyone other than scientists and lab assistants? This novel is about people. Oh, the novel is named after a popular science book, but this is weak sauce if you were hoping for another novel about scientists. The novel itself is quite satisfactory, once you get past the fact that it's not about scientists. But I'm not sure what to say about it. This book compares our thoughts/hopes versus reality; it's a relationship like that of parallax, the distortion that occurs when you look from the air into water... oh gee, I can't believe I'm talking about this. This book is literature. If you want metaphors and themes and stuff like that, this book has them in abundance. It's a fun read if you're into spotting those things.

You don't have to blog about the things you're thinking about. Sometimes the things you're thinking about... don't bear blogging. Sometimes you can use blogging as an excuse to think about something more pleasant for a couple of minutes. E.g.: Great Uncle George's Will is a free comic, online. It's by Andi Watson, who did Skeleton Key, Samurai Jam, Slow News Day, etc etc. It mixes up themes from old folktales with modern manners. It's cute, check it out.

This book is about marketing; about marketing for products which are at a certain stage: they have enthusiastic "early adopters", but no big uptake. This stage sounds familiar to me based on my experience--and apparently it should sound familiar, because it happens a lot. It's so amazing to ship a product, so awesome when you hear that people like it--and then things stall out. Your team works on the next version, polishing your features, waiting for the word-of-mouth to spread... but the word-of-mouth doesn't seem to spread and you start thinking about doing dumb crap like superbowl ads just so that more people will hear about your project because of course if they just hear about it they'll love it like the early adopters did and pick it up too... But that doesn't seem to work out either.

I don't know if the approach espoused in this book works--I haven't tried it. But it sounds reasonable.

You've probably been going after the whole world as your "target market". That's been fine so far. But if you're trying to reach folks beyond the small, enthusiastic fringe of the "early adopters", you want to appear credible. Part of how they decide whether to use your product is--looking around to see if anyone else is using it. You want to aim for 50% of the market so that conservative folks can choose you without finding themselves hanging out with the lunatic fringe. How do you bootstrap your way to that?

Choose a small market. Choose a small market segment with a problem you can solve in a year. You've been trying to solve the world's problems. How about solving the problems of... dental office administrators? If you can tweak your product so that it's the logical choice for dental office administrators, you can probably break into that market. So far the dental office administrators have been struggling along with generic, uhm, calendars that haven't been tweaked to fit their specialized needs. (No optimization for six-month checkups, say.) You'll want to set up comparisons to folks' other choices because folks are more comfy with A/B choices. You're probably going to have to do a bunch of specialized stuff that wasn't part of your original idea. You're probably going to have to think about standards, compatibility... Spread to another small market segment. Another; maybe, like the Macintosh creeping its way out of each company's art department, you can take over the world.

Beware: your company's pioneers, the smart folks who got you this far--they might not enjoy this stuff. Find something else for them to do, pronto. They'll want to keep being disruptive. But the customers you're going after now don't want "disruptive", they want "safe". There are other people-role issues. You'll want someone market-ish to figure out this new market you're muscling in on--someone who can become an expert on dental office administration. This person will spend a year figuring out product stuff, a year during which you won't actually be selling much to the dental folks. Then the sales folks will start selling to the dental admins--and if the marketer did it right, the product will seem to sell itself. But the marketer might have already moved on to develop the next market segment. How do you figure out who did the great stuff--the marketer or the salesfolks? No easy answers; as time goes on, it might be more important to hire folks that work well together than folks who, uhm, accomplish great things on their own.

Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, and you young'uns might have heard of a computer game he worked on more recently called "Deus Ex". He has a blog, and he wrote a fun post recently on word games. He mentioned a game played around the offices of Steve Jackson Games which reminds me of the four-letters or less game from Apprentice Zorg. (Said four-letter word game maybe having come from Harvey Mudd college if I'm remembering an old conversation correctly.) Anyhow: Playing Word Games.

I didn't finish reading this book. It's about software usability. Well, the first few dozen pages were about the importance of software usability, with precious little advice on how to achieve same. I didn't need convincing. I needed advice, but wasn't willing to slog through all those Reminders of Paramount Importance to get to whatever advice there was, if any. So I laid down that book.

The fun of watching cartoons plus the smugness of giving to a good cause: I encourage you to Help Get Sita out of Copyright Jail

You might remember the cartoonist Nina Paley. Or you might not remember her--you've had a while to forget her. She went off for a few years and made an animated movie, "Sita Sings the Blues". I hear that's it's pretty good. If I were to pass along a verbal description, it would sound artsy-fartsy--but it's by Nina Paley, so it's probably pretty funny. Roger Ebert liked it plenty. Yeah, I hear that it's pretty good.

But I can only tell you second-hand reports. I can't see the movie because if anyone were to try to distribute this movie, they'd get sued back to the stone age. There's some music in the movie, old old music that is nevertheless still under copyright. Nina is taking out a huge loan to pay off the copyright holders. And then she's going to make her movie available for free. You can donate to help her pay off the loan. Remember when I Twittered "So, what do religious fundamentalists and big media corporations have in common? They believe that they own culture."? I was quoting Nina, reflecting on her troubles getting this movie into the public eye.

• Donation Site
• Movie site
• Cartoonist's site

Yesterday, I watched a co-worker give a "practice" thesis defense. My workplace has plenty of grad students who are just, uhm, taking a little break from school. He's one of them. I, on the other hand, am the grizzled industry veteran who didn't go to grad school, was pretty darned glad to get out of school and into business where we learned really useful stuff like 286 assembly language. Uhm, whoops. Anyhow, this guy is presenting his thesis, and as part of it he gives a demo of some software. And I growl out "Working code? I thought you said this was a thesis." And I felt bad immediately--here's this guy working so hard towards an advanced degree, does he really need me making fun of the ivory tower right now? Probably not. Anyhow, he talks about what he's been working on, and it's pretty interesting and makes it pretty clear that he's had to done some new, clever stuff. And then he starts talking about how this research might be useful. And someone else in the room pointed out "Hey, it's a thesis--it doesn't have to be useful." And I'm sitting there thinking Hey he said it, not me and who said it? Another co-worker--but he's also a part-time lecturer at a local university's computer science department. Ah, academia. Folks cloistered away in search of knowledge; it can be awkward when they brush up against the real world. Which reminds me: I read Anathem and it was pretty good.

It's scary when you look at it--it has plenty of pages, more than plenty. But it flows quickly, the pages turn. There are ideas inside. You remember ideas, right? They're supposedly why we read science fiction. Far-out ideas, not just another space opera.

On the other hand, it seems cruel to discuss the ideas in Anathem since most of them are introduced as big Reveals. "Isn't it interesting, the idea of Soylent Green being cannibal behavior--reflecting the lessening value of human life..." So reviewers talk about the beginning, which shows us a universe in which a sort of Clock of the Long Now has set up clock/abbeys at places around the world, co-existing with a society somewhere between our own and a sort of tech-instead-of-magic Dying Earth.

I ended up disagreeing with the internal consistency of the book's premise. But I had to think about it. And it was fun to think about. And it's a fun book even if I disagree with the premise. Probably that's because the book isn't just about ideas. There are some fun characters running around in there, too. Towards the end, things seem like an action movie, but it's an action movie in which you care what happens to the characters--and also the action gets weird in places due to... due to ideas which I'm not going to discuss, lest I ruin the Reveal.

Fair warning: this book introduces some strange vocabulary. If you made it through The Book of the New Sun, you won't have trouble with this book. If you do have trouble with this book's vocabulary, be aware that there's a glossary in the back. At least, the edition I read had a glossary at the back. (And even if it hadn't, of course the internet would have come through with the info.)

My neighborhood has a hot dog shack: Underdog. It's at around 18th Ave and Irving. I like it, and suspect that my foodie friends might like it, too. They might not trust my judgement, of course. I've mentioned that since becoming a vegetarian, I don't miss meat--but I do miss the taste of preservatives from hot dogs. But that's not why I like this particular place. Underdog has organic hot dogs and sausages. They also have a few varieties of vegetarian 'dogs to choose from; so far, my favorite is the Polish. Usually, I shop in the evening, after work. The place isn't so busy then, and so far I've been able to snag one of the place's two tables each time. Yes, just two tables. The building is narrow. Somehow it feels cozy instead of claustrophobic.

A couple of blocks away, a new cafe opened up, Hollow. My friend 'Lene posted a list of her favorite cafes. She mentioned that she liked Ritual coffee. So I went to the Ritual homepage to see what places served their coffee. They mentioned one nearby that was opening soon. I gambled that the Ritual folks maybe don't update their pages very often, and sure enough Hollow had opened. Another small space with just a couple of tables. I liked it. Maybe living in my teeny, tiny apartment made me appreciate these spaces?

This book is about cleaning up HTML, the markup language used to write web pages. It's a good book. I'm going to kvetch a lot about parts, but... kvetching comes easy. Anyhow.

You know how liberals are famous for losing credibility with normal folks by... by looking at things from both sides out loud, shooting themselves in the foot along the way? This book is kinda like that at first, but it gets better. It loses credibility early on by arguing at length for XHTML over HTML. There is the usual list of reasons that people use when boosting XHTML, none of which apply to folks writing HTML by hand. Yet, that, apparently, is the audience: "Writing correct XHTML is only even mildly challenging when hand authoring in a text editor." That last sentence indicates an author out of touch with reality as most people experience it. This is forgivable, understandable. The author, Elliotte Rusty Harold, has been looking at raw XML more than most people. He has written more books about XML than... he's written a lot. He has no doubt learned to look <through /> a <forest /> of XML-ish <angle /> <brackets /> (in the same way that an experienced LISP programmer (easily) keeps track of a prairie (of parentheses)). But there are other pieces of advice--assign an id to each element, e.g.-- which suggest that he doesn't normally work in raw XHTML (or HTML); no-one could wade through that much clutter. (In his defense, he does back off and suggest that it's enough to add ids for just some of the major elements--but he says the trade-off is for bandwidth; never mind the sanity of the folks trying to read & edit the code later.) And he misspelled Marc MERLIN's last name. And-- a-- and--

And hang on don't run away; there's a lot of good stuff in this book. This book is basically a big list of ways that you can improve your HTML--and other aspects of your web site. I wish more webmasters would read this book. Though not all pieces of advice apply to all sites, many of them... I wish more webmasters were exposed to more of these issues. I suspect that most webmasters aren't aware of many of them. I wish more webmasters studied up on web accessibility. And I don't really think that the author Harold is an insane XML freak who has lost his instinct for XML's unreadability--I looked at his web page and it's in HTML, not XHTML; Harold doesn't force himself to deal with hand-editing XHTML. To be clear: Harold's web page's HTML is quite readable.

I could imagine using this book as a checklist for sprucing up a site--not following all of the pieces of advice, but considering them. It covers a wide swath of ground: encodings, programming, HTTP, SEO, usability... there's plenty of good stuff here. Check it out; keep your grain of salt handy.

I haven't posted a new J-ska review in ages. Did they do any good? I don't know. I got angry emails from folks who wanted to make sure that I should really give the band Mongol 800 another chance; no, rather, Mongol 800 might deign to give me another chance, and I'd understand their awesomeness just as soon as I understand that the Misfits are really amusing, not dull at all... Sorry, what was the question? Oh, right, "What have I been doing instead of posting J-ska reviews?"

I have entered some releases on Musicbrainz a big music database on the internets. If the RIAA asks, it's totally a coincidence that I entered this information onto a database which happens to be what the standard CD ripping software for Ubuntu uses for sharing information about CDs.

So if there were any Pez Stomp fans who (a) use Musicbrainz and (b) didn't already know that the album "Right Hands for All Children" came out a few years ago, now they can find out. Maybe that data will do the world more good than my music reviews did.

Ideally, this database would look at the information I entered, figure out what kind of music I like, and recommend stuff based on what similar people like. Oh, wait--the only reason I entered information about those albums is that nobody else had done it first. So I guess there's no way that Musicbrainz would know who had similar tastes. Drat.