Adam Keys is Thinking

The awesome Samson and Delilah, “Emilioooooo!”, Belushi and a skinny tie, contemplating the important stuff, The Rule of Least Power, step into the cypher, and Molly.

Given all the hubbub about Kindles, Nooks and their utility, I thought this bears repeating to a wider audience:

The Kindle is great for books that are just a bag of words, but falls short for anything with important visuals.

I’ve really enjoyed reading on my Kindle over the past year. You can’t beat it for dragging a bunch of books with you on vacation or for reading by the poolside. That said, I don’t use it to read anything technical with diagrams or source code listings. I certainly wouldn’t use it to read anything like Tufte, which is exactly why his books aren’t available on the Kindle. Where the Kindle shines is with pop-science books like Freakonomics and Star Wars novels¹.

If you love books and reading, the Kindle is a nice addition to your bibliophilic habit, but it’s no replacement for a well-chosen and varied library.

¹ Did I say that out loud? Crap.

I’m a little conflicted about how and if one should write test code for declarative code. Let’s say I’m writing a MongoMapper document class. It might look something like this:

[sourcecode language=“ruby” gutter=“false”] class Issue

include MongoMapper::Document

key :title, String key :body, String key :created_at, DateTime

end [/sourcecode]

Those key calls. Should I write a test for them? In the past, I’ve said “yes” on the principle that I was test driving the code and I needed something to fail in order to add code. Further, the growing ML-style-typing geek within me likes that writing tests for this is somewhat like constructing my open wacky type system via the test suite.

A Shoulda-flavored test might look something like this:

[sourcecode language=“ruby” gutter=“false”] class IssueTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

context ‘An issue’ do

should_have_keys :title, :body, :created_at

end

end [/sourcecode]

Ignoring the recursive rathole that I’ve now jumped into, I’m left with the question: what use is that should_have_keys? Will it help someone better understand Issue at some point in the future? Will it prevent me from naively breaking the software?

Perhaps this is the crux of the biscuit: by adding code to make certain those key calls are present, have I address the inherent complexity of my application or have I imposed complexity?

I’m going to experiment with swinging back towards leaving these sorts of declarations alone. The jury is still out.

Southern American English

OK, here’s the deal. Wikipedia has it all wrong.

1. Texas is not part of the South. Texas is its own unique thing. Sure we have dumbasses, but they are our dumbasses, wholly distinct from your typical Southern dumbass.
2. In Texas, the way you refer to “you all” is “ya’ll”; it’s a contraction of “ya all”.
3. They neglected to mention the idiomatic pronunciation of words like “oil” (ah-wllllll) or “wash” (warsh).

Please take it under consideration: Wikipedia is edited by a lot of damn Oklahomans.

A bumpy subway wall, loving things for their Unix-y qualities, Kurt Vonnegut looking dapper, the final movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony (originally his fifth), and a music video by Talib Kweli that makes me want to go get my hair cut. Oh, and I can’t leave out the connection between prototyping physical things and applications operating on large data, Ben Scoffield’s take on database taxonomy and a screed on reading one book per week.

(Editor’s note: I recently took to using Tumblr again. For a while, I’ve been curating interesting stuff here. But Tumblr has evolved into a really fantastic application for doing this. So, my policy going forward is to post my stuff here and curate other people’s awesome stuff over there. That said, I’ll probably do “best-of” posts, like this one, to keep you interested and informed.)

Another meme-ish “film” by yours truly. This time, the idea is you do something in five seconds, plus a two second intro and a one second outro. Here’s what I came up with:

This is an adaptation of possibly my favorite improvised joke. I deploy this joke when a conversation is interrupted by some disturbance or noisy distraction. Right before the conversation is going to continue, I say “…and that’s how I met the president and the pope on the same day.” Works pretty well.

Funny aside: I found out about this on the Vimeo site, thinking there was a competition this weekend. Turns out, it was last weekend. Figures.

Trinity gift is $10 million for pedestrian bridge. Catering to pedestrians, in Dallas? Surely you jest!

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

What happens when you take scenes from Ghostbusters and see how New York used to look and how it looks today? Pretty awesome, actually. In two parts.

The birth of Born To Run. On the creation and evolution of the song and album. Great read for Bruce-o-philes.

Time is the New Memory:

The time problem is not easy to see in today's mainstream languages because there are no constructs that make time explicit. It is implicit in the system. We don't even know that's what we're doing when we use locks to try to make this work.

I’ve been thinking about how we represent time in programs for a while. The problem is that concurrent programs are all about time, but mostly, we only use two mechanisms to represent it in our programs.

The semi-explicit way is through locks. When we insert locks around some bit of code, we are giving hints to the system that things should only proceed in a certain order. This ordering gives us a notion of time, but it’s not horribly comforting.

The completely implicit way we represent time in our programs is by ordering calls to functions and the lines of code within those functions. Line 10 always executes before line 11, etc.

The problem that Rich Hickey, who has some fantastic ideas about this time stuff, has in the article I quoted is that time is managed manually and implicitly. When you start writing large concurrent programs, this falls apart. We need better constructs to deal with it.

Think of it like the shift from unstructured programming to structured programming to object-oriented programming. At first we just had a long code listing; no functions, just line after line of code. This became mentally untenable, so we shifted to structured, procedural programming. But some of our data was global and it was often hard to tell what functions belong to what data. So we moved to object-oriented programming and encapsulation.

Hopefully Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton-Jones and other functional programming folks can lead us to is a nice way to structure our programs around time. I’m eager to have my brain melted by what they conjure up.

Here’s a fun game. “The Government”:

Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results.

Often, simply striking out “government” reveals a completely different, and far more useful, commentary.

Polyglot persistence:

I think that many of the NoSQL crowd either fail to either recognize, or to properly describe that their preferred databases don’t replace applications like MySQL and Postgres, just as Ruby doesn’t replace Java. Instead, the explosion of these new options for persistence just work better for some domains (and worse for others).

Ben Scofield’s spot-on here. One of the many transitions we’re undergoing is from “I’ll use MySQL most of my career” to “I’ll tinker with a different database for every project over a couple years and then pick and choose the best as time goes on”.

A programming language zoo, a week of FP heaven, rewriting PHP with Haskell and a game for kids of any age to learn the untyped lambda calculus. Did I ever mention it’s a good time to have a fascination with functional programming languages?

(With due apologies to the creators of New Math, the writers of 30 Rock and the lovely iPod people.)

Why I do Time Tracking

At one point, I tracked every context switch during my work day. I kept a legal pad next to my mouse and I would write down the time whenever I switched between coding, emailing, surfing, talking to someone in my cube or walking around to find someone I needed to talk to.

People thought I was odd. They’d ask what I was jotting down when I noted my context switch, so I briefly explained it. “Okaaaayyyyyy?”, they’d say. An unintended side-effect was that people did end up bugging me about random things less. In fact, it was way more effective at that than putting up a sign that said “unless something is on fire, email me”. So it goes.

I never ended up running any aggregate numbers on the data. But, it did give me an idea about the frequency and cost of my context switches. I wish there was a better way to track this sort of thing passively. I’m sure it would still shock me how much time I go in and out of focus.

If you’ve never tried this sort of experiment, it’s worth running for a week or two. You’ll almost certainly notice something worth trying to cut out by glancing over the list of things you’re spending time or wasting focus on.

Fred in depth.

Still crazy after all these years:

Politicians should tone down the rhetoric. Protesters should read some history before making Hitler comparisons. Talk-show hosts should stop pretending that paranoid nitwits are asking reasonable questions.

The Economist does well to explain the insanity that is propagated by American political media. Reading articles like this help me stay sane. Also: ignoring media with deadlines shorter than a week, and consuming as much constructive satire as possible.

Almost five years ago, we were witness to the reinvention of web frameworks. A couple upstarts named Django and Rails appeared at almost the same time, espousing many of the same values. In the typical Gandhi-cycle, they were first ignored, the incumbents fought them, and then they achieved victory over the incumbents. Today, any framework that’s used on new projects is likely to have more than a hint of Django and Rails in it.

Today, we’re seeing the same thing for databases. Something is going on and things are changing. Barring an unprecedented departure of fashion from software development, I’ll look back five years from now and write about some other shift in the development landscape.

But, all shifts like this need a name. Right now, the best we have is NoSQL. The problem with that name is that it only defines what it is not. That makes it confrontational and not amazingly particular to what it includes or excludes.

Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB, has noted the need for a better name for this storage revolution. Allow me to proffer mine:

Post-relational

What we’re seeing its the end of the assumption that valuable data should go in some kind of relational database. The end of the assumption that SQL and ACID are the only tools for solving our problems. The end of the viability of master/slave scaling. The end of weaving the relational model through our application code.

We’re seeing an explosion in the ideas about how one should store important data. We’re looking at data to see if it’s even worth persisting. We’re experimenting with new semantics around structure, consistency and concurrency.

In the same way that post-modernism is about reconsidering the ways of the past in art and architecture, post-relational is a chance for software developers to reconsider our own ways. Just as post-modernism didn’t invalidate the entire history of art, post-relational won’t invalidate the usefulness of relational databases.

However, it’s likely that those working in some domains will decide that non-relational databases better fit their needs. That’s progress in our field. It’s fun to watch.

Say it with me: post-relational databases, post-relational storage, post-relational thinking, or simply, post-relational.

Remember when you first started programming? Those early days when you'd take some code out of a book or article, type it out, and then try to make it print silly things or draw funny pictures?

The thing I remember about those days was the temptation to blame the compiler for all the ills of my code. Something doesn't work right and you can't figure out why? Blame the compiler! Of course, this was never right. The compiler is very rarely incorrect.

My goal today is to bring back the joy of blaming the compiler. Of course, Ruby doesn't _have_ a compiler (yet!), so we have to play tricks. But that's part of the fun!

Let's blame the compiler.

See, all you have to do is extend BlameTheCompiler. And then you'll find yourself with one chance in every three executions to say "Hmm, I'm sure I defined that method. Something must be wrong with Ruby." Just like those early days of programming, you're half right. The other half is that you've got a little prankster running in your application.

It's a fun parlour trick. I would not, however, recommend sending code including BlameTheCompiler in as a bug report to the JRuby or Rubinius folks. They wouldn't find it as funny as you or I.

People with two cellphones worry me.

(More six word stories. Also, an article as such in Wired.)