Blog
2022 End of Year Booklist
There was a little less reading this year. I was busy with work and especially family after ending my commute to Miami in May. I did read good books. I recommend all of thse except The Comfort Crisis. It played too much on the pop trend of discomfort and friction in life to overcome the boredom and depression that so many people feel.
I did reread some fiction books this year, but since they weren’t new, I didn’t list them.
I started tracking the books I abandoned: six of them this year and a mix of fiction and nonfiction. I’ve lost patience with books that are difficult to read without reward.
I should read The Big Picture again. It’s a big book, and I skimmed the latter 2/3 of it. It starts with basic principles of the universe and builds up to how the world works at a human level. It tries to connect them, e.g., that human behavior is an emergent property of the complex system that is life. In turn, life is a complex system that is built from fundamental physics. To me, it was an attempt to explain how God’s hand has worked. Next on the list is to try once again to get through A New Kind of Science.
Nonfiction
2021 End of Year Booklist
I sampled a lot this year with mixed results. Einstein’s Fridge was the most surprising in that I was completely unaware of the connection between thermodynamics and information theory. How Innovation Works also validated a lot of my own experience with what it takes to go from an idea, or even a proof of concept, to a product that solves a problem for customers. Superpower Interrupted and The Ascent of Money were probably the most useful in understanding what’s happening in international politics and economics today. Other books like The Bomber Mafia and The Code Breaker were entertaining but didn’t leave me with much more than trivia.
Kazuo Ishiguro never disappoints.
Nonfiction
Fiction
25dec2021
- Fundraising and Deal Structure
- Silicon Valley believes you start a crypto company with traditional
capital investment and then transition to community ownership after
product-market fit is achieved. There is a parallel to co-ops here.
- Cryto Business Models
- More from a16z. Blockchain-based platforms depend on network effects
to capture value at each of layers 1 and 2.
- Why Decentralization?
- Somewhat related, and also from an a16z person. Blockchain has the
ability to break the dysfunction of Web 2.0 multi-sided platforms
where the platform owner eventually, always will screw their users.
- Atala PRISM
- Commercial site for IOHK’s digital ID solution built on Cardano.
This is a prerequisite for blockchains to get real-world traction.
- zkLedger
- Using zero-knowledge proofs to audit a blockchain ledger without
revealing private information. This will be another prerequisite
for widescale blockchain adoption.
- Djed: Implementing Algorithmic Stablecoins for Proven Price Stability
- Includes a very useful diagram that takes the magic out of this and
shows how it works.
11dec2021
- The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
- Huning’s assessment of the United States is not wrong, and while I
don’t think any westerner thinks China’s approach to the same problem
will work, at least they’re trying something different.
- How to Write Usefully
- Getting specific about writing to clarify thinking. Useful writing
is correct writing that is strong as it can be without being false.
- The Hard Truth about Innovation Cultures
- Innovation takes discipline and also talent: both from individual
contributors and managers.
- The Extended UTXO Model
- EUTXO is an alternative to account-based ledgers like Ethereum that
allows for contracts that are easier to reason about given concurrency
on the blockchain.
- Smart Contracts and DApps
- Lecture from 2018 MIT course on cryptocurrency with Larry Lessig
addressing how contract law views programmed contracts. Blockchain
designs will have to allow contract (and property) law to be applied.
- Language Workbenches: The Killer App for Domain-Specific Languages?
- Useful framing of language-oriented programming. The distinction
between external and internal DSLs is useful. How far can you get
with a language workbench in 2021 using VS Code with language server
extensions?
- Programming Bottom Up
- This is a reason why internal DSLs are so powerful.
2020 End of Year Booklist
My 2020 goal was to read some harder books, but this didn’t really happen. I read Meditations, which was a tough but worthwhile read. It made The Obstacle is the Way feel cheap. Instead this year I spent a lot of time on work, and when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about bicycling. In the year of Covid, indoor workouts on the trainer and a focus on improving fitness kept me going. Several books are about cycling.
At the end of Q3 my job role changed, and I took over R&D for the flow cytometry business at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. I had a crash course in immunology and flow cytometry with a few books to guide me.
Fiction was limited to just All the Pretty Horses, which is a beautiful book and well worth the time. For the most part, I felt much too busy to enjoy fiction this year.
Nonfiction
Fiction
2019 End of Year Booklist
2019 was a good year for reading. I largely abandoned reading online, and my linklog shows it. In a patterns similar to 2018, work was abundant, and I didn’t spend much time on hobbies. Reading filled the buffer of free time as it came and went.
I limited management reading this year, trying to consolidate what I had learned last year and get grounded with the Miami development center. I relocated to Miami in the fourth quarter and picked up books on appreciation and feedback, examining some gaps in my leadership style exposed by the site change. Neither book is strong, but I found the practical direction a useful starting point.
My goal for 2020 is to read harder books with meatier themes. I reread On Grand Strategy late this year and got more out of it, but it’s still tough. That led me to Adler’s How to Read a Book, and I wish I had read this when starting college. Now I have a reading list built from the great books.
Fiction this year was a mixed bag. I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time since high school. There is more depth and nuance to the book than I remembered and reading it helped purge the movies as my recollection of the story. The other books were fun pulp.
Nonfiction
Fiction
23jun2019
- How the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
- Good description of hardware limitations that led to the software
design. Judgmental, though, and no insight on FMEA or other analyses
that led to Boeing going with the design they did. No insight to any
testing of the implementation. Overall I’m surprised IEEE Spectrum
chose to publish this.
- Goodbye Joe
- Lost a hero.
- The New Wilderness
- Maciej Cegłowski introduces the notion of ambient privacy.
- Apollo 11 in Real Time
- Neat!
21apr2019
- Lessons from Six Software Rewrite Stories
- Interesting examples of how to evolve your platform within
constraints of business models.
- The Play Defecit
- An argument against parent supervision. I wonder what the Chinese
would say about this given long school days and an extra day on the
weekend.
- How to Apologize
- Sometimes you need reminded of the fundamentals.
- Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
- Delightful.
- 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook
- This story surprised me in two ways. First, I didn’t realize the
degree to which Facebook controlled journalism through advertising.
Second, if the factual recounting is true, I can’t imagine working
for a company with executive management that behaves like this.
10feb2019
- Why Jupyter is Data Scientists’ Computational Notebook of Choice
- Overview of how Jupyter is being used in 2018. It’s come a long
way, fast. Would be interesting to understand the difference between
Mathematica and Jupyter users.
- Electron and the Decline of Native Apps
- Could not agree more with the damage that Electron is doing to
desktop applications. The bigger problem that Gruber doesn’t
identify is that _nobody_ uses a single platform anymore. Web apps
broke it, and mobile operating systems have accelerated the decline.
- How are Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult
- Baugruppen is an interesting idea. I’d settle for in who I see
day-to-day and year-to-year. I’ve lived in my neighborhood 20
years. Only one other family is still with us. Some houses have
turned over as many as four times in that span.
- How to Be Successful
- Interesting and a little unusual. Risk/reward pops up again here.
- Nethack Ascension in Record Time
- Pretty fun hack based on finding the RNG seed.
2018 End of Year Booklist
2018 was my biggest year reading in several years because I made time for it. Judging by linklog posts, I spent about the same about of time as 2017 in reading online. I spent less time on hobbies. I used reading as buffer that I could dial up or down depending on workload and family commitments, both of which I rightly figured would be unpredictable this year. As usual, I’m only including the books I read that I recommend. I dropped just a few; it was a fortunate year reading.
I was busy in fourth quarter with work-related reading. I began managing a second development center at work, and I need to scale up my management. The book High Output Management was easily the most relevant book I read this year. I came to it after reading Measure What Matters and then, on a whim, rereading the The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I first read Horowitz’s book in 2014. I was surprised to see I was down on it, but a couple of years experience in higher management has changed my perspective. Both books pointed me at High Output Management, and I highly recommend it to senior managers.
Also related to work, I recommend The Phoenix Project to any technical manager who is trying to sell cloud-based services in an organization whose business model is based on designing, building, and shipping physical things. The book is grounded in lean production principles (from which we all know Agile is derived), so it will give you vocabulary and metaphors which are meaningful to your colleagues.
The rest of my nonfiction list is all over the place. Click on a few links and see what you like. On Grand Strategy is academic and a difficult read but worth the energy at least for the first half of the book.
For fiction, Cloud Atlas was also a difficult read but worth the effort. The Remains of the Day is beautiful and poetic. I’m in awe of the mood that Ishiguro can evoke between the sentences and paragraphs of his writing. It is writing at the opposite extreme of Grove. Where Grove teaches KPIs and MBOs and management discipline, Ishiguro teaches humanity in a life of compounding mistakes and individual discipline. I do not think I could have appreciated this book at 30 years old or even 40 years old.
Nonfiction
- High Output Management by Andy Grove
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
- Leadership and the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi
- Measure What Matters by John Doerr
- How Apollo Flew to the Moon by David Woods
- Site Reliability Engineering by Niall Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, and Jennifer Petoff
- The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- Cleopatra: a Life by Stacy Schiff
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
- Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
- Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Peterson
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0 by Thomas Friedman
- Huế 1968 by Mark Bowden
- On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis
- The Innovator’s DNA by Clayton Christensen, Jeff Dyer, and Hal Gregersen
Fiction
04nov2018
- IBM to Buy Red Hat
- This fortifies IBM’s cloud business. There’s been no doubt for a
while all my customers are going to private/public clouds, and
on-premise deployments will continue to diminish.
- How to Consistently Hire Remarkable Data Scientists
- Interesting hiring process. Looks like it would work well if you
have specialized roles and there are good ideas in this regardless.
- 15 Surprising Things Productive People Do Differently
- Not using a todo list was one of the more interesting ones. I don’t
really buy that but think instead it’s making a todo list only to
selectively ignore it. I have no idea how I would theme my days
given my company’s culture, but it’s worth considering.
- Pinion Bicycle Gearboxes
- Some ex-Bosch engineers decided to make a bicycle transmission. Very
cool, very high-end.
29jul2018
- Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags
- Cory Doctorow piece. "The problem is that we’re confusing
automated persuasion with automated targeting." This is a
must-read.
- How to Write a Great Research Paper
- Good tips for any kind of technical communication.
- We Were Not Born Talented, Brave, and Fearless
- An article about the mindset of those who tour on bicycle. It
explains the cultutral difference between carpet land and the
factory. The challenge is to get this mindset into product
development, where the problems are more abstract.
- How to Train for Long-Distance Cyle Touring
- It’s tongue-in-cheek and a fun read. The problem-solving stance
doesn’t come up though!
08jul2018
- Adventure Cycling Organization
- Premier North America bicycle travel organization. Want to travel by
bicycle in the U.S.? This is the place to start.
- Zwift
- Online gaming applied to cycling. It’s a hoot. For indoor training
also check out TrainerRoad.
- Who is Joe Davis?
- Find the Lisp but stay and listen to what he says about the nature
of work and of intellectual curiosity.
- NoCAN: the wired IoT platform for makers
- Wireless is complicated and takes power. This is a nice project to
see funded.
10jun2018
- Explaining the Mystery of Numbers Stations
- Nice introduction to numbers stations and a
couple of
sites that follow them.
- Wide-Band SDR in the Netherlands
- You don’t need a shortwave radio to listen to high-frequency (HF)
stations. Web-based, wide-band software-defined radios let multiple
users listen to different parts of the band concurrently. The site
sdr.hu has a global list of stations running
kiwisdr.
- One-Time Pads
- Great introduction to one-time pads for encrypted communication and
their history. You can get good random number
generators if you want to make your own.
- Argo
- Buoys, implemented. Observation network not distributed storage.
Uses Iridium for its network.
- Freewheelin’ Community Bikes
- Decent bike co-op in Indianapolis. Well, technically not a co-op but
seems to very much have a co-op culture. Volunteer opportunities to
get started.
20may2018
- A Rubicon
- Dan Geer essay on software and AI risk.
- Richard Stallman on Privacy, Data, and Free Software
- Classic Stallman. The problem with today’s plutocratic, neoliberal
ideology goes way beyond software, however.
- Supply-Chain Security
- Very scary. Traditional supply chain infrastructure doesn’t manage
software change well at all, despite the technology being available
to do it. It doesn’t adequately address malware injection at
inception, either.
- Details on a New PGP Vulnerability
- Initial report from Bruce Schneier. Some followup in the comments.
This isn’t a vulnerability in PGP. It’s the way it interacts with
modern email programs. It’s a good example of unintended
consequences in system integration.
- EFF’s New Wordlists for Random Passphrases
- From 2016, but this is a good reference. You are using passphrases
for your important passwords, right?
11feb2018
- Falcon Heavy and the era of post-scarcity heavy lift launch
- Changing the economics of getting payload into orbit changes program
design in two dimensions: modular design of orbiting platforms, and
risk profile.
- Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
- Colin Percival’s taken on the most recent speculative execution
flaws including a good explanation of the problems. I like how the
BSD team thinks.
- What really happened with Vista: an insider’s perspective
- An engineer’s response to an engineer’s
response
to popular press articles on Microsoft’s "lost decade." Great
perspective on operating system design, large system design, and the
consequences of poor execution in large development programs.
2017 End of Year Booklist
2017 was light on reading compared to the last couple of years. This year I tried beekeeping. I also tried HAM radio and small electronics projects. I spent a lot of time reading about these topics online. You can see my linklog for references.
Outside of beekeeping references, nonfiction didn’t have a big impact on my day-to-day life this year. I read Hamilton’s biography, and the lesson I’m learning as I read more biographies of great people is that persistence, hard work, and “showing up” has as much to do with success as intelligence. Antifragile was a letdown: a lot of theory and what good looks like, but not much on how to build antifragile systems. Antifragile people organizations certainly interest me though.
Fiction choices wandered straight into science fiction and fantasy. They were entertaining stories and had their messages. The Forever War is commentary on America’s war in Viet Nam. The Broken Earth Trilogy deals with race, family, and community. Both are sending me in other directions. Hue 1968 and The Remains of the Day are at the top of the list. I’m still looking at other Hugo winners to see if I can find something really great.
Nonfiction
Fiction
19nov2017
- The Long Goodbye to C
- Interesting post from Eric Raymond. He thinks Go, Rust, and Cx are
finally serious competitors to C for new systems programming
projects.
- Life Hacking Considered Harmful
- Cory Doctorow on the long-term effects of Getting Things Done.
This reflects my own personal experience as well.
- Motherboard Digital Security Guide
- Pointers to a few different security guides. I like all of these,
but I always work continuously to minimize surface area, i.e., the
online services I have to use.
- The Future of Forgeries
- Consider this in the context of fake news and willful disinformation
campaigns.
01oct2017
- Randy Oliver Workshop
- 3-part workshop with Randy
Oliver. Great overview of bee
colony management based on what the bees are telling you. Reinforces
the idea of the colony as a superorganism and that what a beekeeper
is practicing is animal husbandry.
- Slow Reading: the Affirmation of Authorial Intent
- Read first to understand, without judgment, what the author’s
intent was. Slow reading is an exercise in humility and
acknowledging you might have something to learn. This is part of
what it means to be literate.
- The Lo-Fi Manifesto
- Use production technology that is stable and free.
- Every Cut of Meat Explained
- Watch this butcher break down a side of beef and explain all the
cuts as he goes.
25jun2017
- Learning from the Core Engine Architecture of Destiny
- Great software engineering lessons from the evolution of Bungie’s
engine from blam! to Tiger. Well worth reading. The
presentation is on
YouTube as well.
- When Safety and Security Become One
- Post from Ross Anderson plugging a recent paper he co-authored. Puts
in relief that software engineering practices we use today for
implementing security are not going to work with IoT where safety is
critical, e.g., automobiles. No recommendations on what to change
with software engineering pratices.
- Five Questions about Language Design
- Prescient essay from Paul Graham back in 2001 on programming
language design motivations and problems.
- How I Finally Learned Git
- Less about git and more about how he went about learning it. I like
the ignorance.md technique.
- The Innovator’s Method
- Pretty good book that combines elements of The Lean Startup, What
Customer’s Want, and Business Model Generation into a structure
that makes it easier to introduce these principles into an existing
(large) organization. I’m pushing this at work.
11jun2017
- The Sustinable Apiary by Michael Palmer
- Michael Palmer of Vermont has been keeping bees for 45 years. He’s
an old-timer now. This is the first of two talks on how to maintain
a self-sustaining apiary with the second talk being about queen
rearing. Inspirational.
- Bush Farms Beekeeping
- Michael Bush’s site. He’s a well-respected, old-timer beekeeper in
Illinois focusing on practical beekeeping.
- Scientific Beekeeping
- Randy Oliver’s site. He’s another well-respected beekeeper
focusing on pest control, especially varroa and nosema. He does not
advocate treatment-free beekeeping, but if most people trying to do
it are incompetent, there’s something to be said for that advice.
He’s a biologist and therefore brings some analytical discipline to
the work.
- University of Guelph Honey Bee Research Centre
- University of Guelph video series. This is a great collection of
high-quality videos focusing on the fundamental mechanics of working
with hives and bees. A must-watch for any new beekeeper.
- An Interview with Mike Palmer
- Back to Mike Palmer, this is a neat interview where you can get a
sense of his personality and his opinions on commercial beekeeping.
More evidence that the top 1% in all fields have many of the same
personality traits.
04jun2017
- Tectonic Typesetting System
- An attempt at making TeX easier to use.
- New Economic School 2017 Talk on Software Startups
- Notes from Phil Greenspun’s talk on software startups. Great read!
- Flashcards and Spaced Reptition for org-mode
- An add-on for org-mode to drill using spaced
reptition. I
scored 95% on the technician and general HAM license exams with
minimal effort using this.
- Org Tutorials
- A nice collection of org-mode tutorials. The section on tables and
spreadsheets is especially helpful.
- Exporting org-mode to Jupyter Notebooks
- A win for open formats.
20feb2017
- Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown
- Good introduction to Pandoc and its Markdown extensions.
- Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability
- Institutional and technology innovations allow groups to scale group
participation. Fiat currency and contract law are two examples.
Blockchains are another. What innovations allow cooperatives to
scale past the Dunbar number?
- How to Build a Better Block
- Praise the doers.
- The Maker’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
- Looks fun.
2016 End of Year Booklist
2016 was a pretty good year for reading. I had long hours at work but found the time to read edited books by reducing the online reading. (You can see this reflected in my linklog this year.) As in 2014 and 2015, I’ll force-rank my lists, and I omitted the stinkers.
I ranked the nonfiction by impact on my day-to-day life. Books that helped me be a better R&D manager topped the list. Skunk Works surprised me by reinforcing some of the management practices I use already but in a different industry and context. I read Private Empire in response to Trump’s nomination of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State and afterwards found myself agreeing that Tillerson is a good choice. The Buzz About Bees is worth reading for the science and especially the photography. The pictures convey the behavior and the beauty of bees in a way I’ve never seen before. All of the books in this list are quite good.
I surprised myself ranking The Marriage Plot ahead of the The Sun Also Rises. I have college-aged daughters, and Eugenides captures that phase of life where school is ending and the next, unclear steps are ahead of you. I discovered that the movie Fight Club reflects the style of the book, but the book has a few more twists and details. You will like the book if you liked the movie.
Nonfiction
Fiction
12dec2016
- SQLite Query Language: WITH clause
- Recursive SQL queries. Cool.
- How to Write a Git Commit Message
- Must read. Teams need agreement on how to write commit logs.
- 2016 Interactive Fiction competition winners
- Still seeing some nice diversity in development and runtime
environments. It’s not just Inform anymore.
- Social Media is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV
- Scary.
- Skunk Works
- Interesting history of innovation at Lockheed’s advanced product
development center. Not a management book but a good read for any
experienced engineering manager who wants to innovate in a lean
environment.
18sep2016
- You Suck at Excel, with Joel Spolsky
- Worth an hour if you spend a lot of time in Excel. Good tips on how
to create readable and thus debuggable workbooks. Notes are on a
Trello board if
you are pressed for time.
- Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet
- The military/industrial complex continues its transition to
“cyberwar.” I’m learning first-hand with
Sovereign just how hard it
is to articulate what a secure system means. Look forward to more
tax dollars going into "cyberwar defense."
- Why Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden
- Good read for the politics, but it’s also a reminder not just that
“culture eats strategy for lunch,” but that culture dominates
almost everything in an organization.
- How to Get Your Change Into the Linux Kernel
- Sane and reasonable. Sections 2-3 ought to apply to every single
project. Consider what Sections 11 and 13 mean for your own project.
The whole document is well worth reading. I also recommend browsing
Linux kernel
commits
to see good examples.
31jul2016
- The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing
- Good essay from Nick Szabo motivating blockchain computers and their
role in secure computing. It explains why
Ethereum was developed.
- Two-Speed IT - The More I Look the Worse It Gets
- How platforms should evolve versus how companies want them to
evolve.
- An Introduction to Wardley Mapping
- This is an mapping/diagramming tool for technology roadmaps. It’s
worth reading this
article
for context and then this
article
for a little more structure and a cheat sheet.
- How to Run an Effective Meeting
- I’m a big fan of the book. The second edition has some nice
improvements.
10jul2016
- Rosalind
- A platform for learning bioinformatics and Python programming
through problem solving. Neat!
- Fedora Analysis Framework
- First collect the data, then figure out what to do with it.
- MetaPost for Beginners
- A system for drawing pictures inspired by MetaFont. Uses systems of
linear equations for constraint satisfaction. Interesting to
contrast with functional
postscript.
- How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War
- Even virtual currency has to bottom out in the real world. Bitcoin
is controlled by the mining pools, and that depends on finding cheap
power, a real-world problem. Also, again, we see the problem of
hardware people not understanding the whole system when software is
on the stack.
- Dead reckoning, maps, and errors
- Fascinating historical look at navigation.
12jun2016
- Nextcloud
- Core development team from OwnCloud parts ways with the company and
forks the project.
- 2016 Internet Trends Report
- A marketing perspective.
- Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open
- Interesting, but the problems to address are in the application
stack, not the OS and filesystem layers.
- On the Impending Crypto Monoculture
- A retreat from the open-source culture of unfocused design and its
resulting complexity.
- Hand-Crafted Containers
- Lower-level introduction to containers. Much better if you really
want to know what’s happening.
15may2016
- Bill Gross Investment Outlook May 2016
- Automation will accelerate adoption of universal basic income (UBI).
Implications on monetary policy and investment returns.
- Apple and Didi is about Foreign Cash and the Future of Motoring
- Makes Apple’s investment in Didi look brilliant. A good example
of 1) how US Federal tax law is blocking capital investment in the
United States, 2) how US culture biases how many think about
technology adoption, and 3) a smart business strategy for
accelerating entry into a huge market. Is it in Apple’s DNA to
leverage this move fully?
- zfs-linux
- ZFS lands in Debian unstable. I’m ok waiting another year for it to
get into stable. You want to trust your filesystem 100%.
- Certbot
- The official Let’s Encrypt client has moved to the EFF and changed
names. This has been a great effort, personally saving me a couple
hundred dollars a year for SSL certificates.
01may2016
- Bento Lab
- Portable Sanger sequencing. Very cool although not sure where you
get the primers.
- OpenTrons
- Worth keeping an eye on.
- Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of the "The Go Programming Language" Book
- XML, troff, make, and lots of scripts.
- Off the Grid
- Appealing but ultimately misguided. Millenials want to change the
world, or at least their country, and it’s foolish to think that
they’ll abandon networking tools. Better to think about what the
moral and ethical use of the tools looks like.
- Dirty Hands
- Cheating in bridge. Fascinating from an information theory point of
view. How much can you cheat without letting on to observers that
you are doing so? Why not just admit it as part of the game?
06mar2016
- Write Code that is Easy to Delete, not Easy to Extend
- Feels like a work in progress but definitely some good ideas.
- Qubes OS
- A reasonably secure operating system based on the Xen hypervisor.
It’s an interesting design but not ready for primetime. Hardware
support is still pretty limited.
- LXC 1.0 Blog Post Series
- A good introduction to how to use Linux containers. Cut past the
Docker hype and learn the basic tool.
- The Setup / Jana Kinsman
- Can’t believe I missed this one.
07feb2016
- Marvin Minsky, 1927-2016
- R.I.P.
- The Sad State of Web Development
- To paraphrase Dave Winer, if don’t keep your users in mind, then
all you will see is a bunch of code, and the only improvement you
can see is to the code itself. This madness with stacks must stop,
but I don’t see yet where we’ll land.
- Principles of Early Drug Discovery
- Nice introduction to the domain.
- The Assay Guidance Manual
- Started at Lilly and now curated by the NIH. It’s a wealth of
information on assays to evaluate how drugs modulate biochemical
activity.
17jan2016
- The New China Syndrome
- In the name of free trade, the US abandoned the trade policy that
protected our interests as a democracy. We’re starting to pay for
the consequences of this mistake in China. Good read.
- Predictions for 2016
- Phil Greenspun pessimistic.
- Communications Security at Riseup.net
- Great overview of practical techniques for improving security and
deterring surveillance.
- The Website Obesity Crisis
- Touches on design, engineering, and malevolent advertising.
- Main Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition
- Great lists. Why can’t we be so critical of OS X and Windows?
2015 End of Year Booklist
Here is a recap of the reading I did in 2015.
The big read this year was Infinite Jest. Most of the online reviews are correct: you have to get a few hundred pages into it before it starts to make sense. There are long passages of writing that just make no sense, and then there are long passages that are just some of the best prose I’ve ever read. I can say now I’m one of the few who have both started and finished the book.
Seveneves and The Martian are interesting to contrast with Red Mars. Red Mars is epic, mostly politics with some science thrown in. Seveneves and the Martian are almost entirely focused on the science but at different scales. Both were a pleasure to read and come at a time when I want to believe as a civilization we are starting to hunt for the next big problems to tackle. Similar books on dealing with energy consumption would be welcome.
I left several stinkers off the nonfiction list, but I guess I had to wade through them to find a couple of gems: Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The Open Organization. Drucker’s book is a good contrast to The Lean Startup. Innovation and Entrepreneurship puts these topics in the context of business overall much better than The Lean Startup and probably has just as many practical take-aways. I would read both together. The Open Organization was a good read on company culture and should have the biggest influence on how I try to affect engagement at work. I read it early in the year but need to read it again.
Here are my lists, force-ranked.
Nonfiction
Fiction
20dec2015
- What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change?
- Bret Victor with concrete suggestions on how to attack the climate
change problem. Great read on many levels including presentation,
systems thinking, tools for scientists and engineers (with a plug
for domain-specific programming languages), and better models for
the literate.
- Radical Candor
- Care personally, challenge directly. It’s written for managers, but
it applies to anybody who needs to give feedback including
individual contributors and technical leaders.
- The Coddling of the American Mind
- Emotional reasoning is overwhelming schools. Cognitive behavioral
therapy could be an effective tool for restoring more rational
thinking. How do we return to free-range parenting to avoid the
problem in the first place?
- If You Want to Say Thank You, Don’t Say Sorry
- Good to put on the bathroom mirror for a couple of weeks.
22nov2015
- Haunted By Data
- Another speech by Maciej Ceglowski in which he compares Big Data to
nuclear power. He touches on, but does not fully explore, the idea
that Big Data is not a miracle technology and that it can lead to
models to complex to use productively. Possibly interesting
ramifications in Genomics as it moves to clinical use.
- European Court Rules "Safe Harbor" Invalid
- I am not surprised. This is a complication though for companies
genuinely trying to help their customers across international
boundaries.
- Generation Wuss
- Great reading for performance review season!
- Linus’s Rant Rewritten
- And the
original.
It’s funny at first blush, but it also highlights how important a
good code review culture is.
- Faster Optimization
- Neat result in general-purpose solvers.
11oct2015
- What Happens Next Will Amaze You
- The whole speech is great, but the best part is the riff on venture
capitalists as central planners. The Indianapolis startup culture is
dysfunctional in the same ways, and it even infects how Indiana
measures the success of
startups.
- The Bourne Aesthetic
- Design should consider the whole lifecyle and reconsider how we are
expected to engage with technology.
- The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)
- Interesting.
20sep2015
- I Have One of the Best Jobs in Academia
- …here’s why I’m walking away. Universities are broken, but
it’s been a long, slow decline since the 1970s and is into the
second generation of students. The debt part of the equation is the
most alarming.
- How and Why We Designed Ludida
- Nice review of the thinking that went into the design and how it was
expressed. Great read for those of us who know a little bit about
type design but aren’t fluent in it.
- Using org-mode as a Day Planner
- An example of a mature task-handling workflow using org-mode. I
don’t care for prioritizing tasks because I think it makes the
system too fiddly, but hey, whatever works for you.
- Pretotyping
- A lot of overlap with The Lean Startup, and Eric Ries has
definitely gotten the press, but there is pragmatic advice here also
on how to do better design in the fuzzy front end of product
definition.
- Crosseyed and Painless
- The history of Phish’s cover of Talking Heads’s Crosseyed and
Painless. Good performance videos from both bands embedded.
23aug2015
- ACM Classic Book Series
- Good list although seems short on distributed systems and databases.
- Top 10 Worst C# Features
- This is Erik Lippert’s list. Interesting mix of both syntactic and
semantic issues and highlights tradeoffs in language design.
- Bitcoin XT
- Bitcoin is forking, because the community is divided on how to
handle limits in the current protocol. Bitcoin XT is the proposed
solution. Pretty neat that the vote will be in the blockchain.
- Sidechain Elements
- Interesting approach for extending Bitcoin’s capabilities in a
backwards-compatible way.
- Hackers Post Ashley Madison Data
- Huge privacy breach, possibly more disruptive than the larger
breaches at Target, etc. The
data
includes credit card transactions and personally identifiable
information. What role could Bitcoin have played in anonymity and
security?
09aug2015
- Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers
- Read and abstract. A weapon is a machine for delivering energy to a
target. In the vein of "software is eating the world," expect
weapon platforms to continue to simplify in hardware and complicate
in software. AI is just one component of this.
- How I Gave Up Alternating Current
- An interesting idea poorly executed but nonetheless inspiring.
- Too Long, Read Anyway
- Verbal communication is not a substitute for reading and writing.
- Highland Bees
- I met Tim at the Boulder Farmers Market while on vacation. Amazing
honey compared to the clover honey we get in Indiana.
- Natural Project Planning with org-mode
- A way to execute GTD’s natural planning using org mode to envision
success, brainstorm, and organize.
- The Singular Mind of Terry Tao
- Good bio of a mathematician.
05jul2015
- The End of Men
- What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional,
social, and physical. "But you ain’t none of those in that house.
All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that."
- Who Has the Right to a Dignified Death?
- Euthanasia in Belgium. Interesting for the anti-Catholic sentiment
and the ethics. What is the meaning of life when there is no God,
when you are not successful in society?
- Severine von Tscharner Fleming
- Organizer and cultural worker in the young farmers movement. She
reminds me of activists from college. Some fun writing: "And so,
due to my own sloth, I remain tethered to monopoly and main-lined to
the dreaded total-surveillance of Google Docs and Dropbox."
07jun2015
- Don’t Forget All the Parts Move"
- Good lessons from RIM on how you have to respond to a platform
transition.
- Information Letter 14
- John Walker’s famous memo calling to action AutoDesk’s management.
Worth noting that AutoDesk’s problems were in every part of the
business, not just product development.
- Surveillance Self-Defense
- Tips, tools, and how-tos for safer online communication. A large set
of articles with playlists that cover specific topics depending on
what you do.
- The 10 Most Important Things to Simplify in Your Life
- Entry point to the Minimalism movement. Another prominent blog
here.
- Happy Mothers Day from the NYT: Fathers are Useless
- The reader comments Greenspun chooses to quote are priceless.
22mar2015
- Playtesting Mobile Games at the DMV
- Brilliant.
- Invisible Boyfriend
- Again, brilliant. My daughter was all over this.
- GPG and Me
- Legitimate perspective on the state of GPG, but he doesn’t propose
an alternative because there isn’t one. Until then, it’s what
we’ve got.
- Flow Hive
- A new frame design that lets you harvest honey without opening the
hive’s boxes. Wax is not harvested. It is clever and a great idea
if you are aiming to be efficient, but when do technology advances
compromise the experience?
- The Unfinished
- New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace not long after his death.
Helpful for putting [Infinite Jest]{.underline} in context.
22feb2015
- The Great SIM Heist
- NSA and GCHQ accmplish bulk theft of SIM encryption keys by
exploiting weak supply chain security.
- The FBI Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know About "Stingray" Use
- Local US law enforcement uses the FBI as a speedbump when citizens
try to get information about Stingray use.
- Automated Drug Screening
- This system uses machine learning techniques to iterate screening
assays to automatically find the compounds that react best agains a
target.
- The Rundown
- How to eliminate smalltalk, forever. “If you can think it, you can
ask it.”
08feb2015
- Transcriptic
- Interesting twist on the CRO model for people who want total control
over their screens.
- One Minute Sculpture
- The Indianapolis Museum of Art has a series of One Minute Sculptures by
Erwin Wurm. Lots of fun on a busy weekend.
- A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
- More like "a career in science in academia," which has already become
a joke as universities continue to lose oxygen and suffer from the crush
of mammoth physical plants built in the post-war generation.
- What Was Pete Carroll Thinking?
- Good analysis of the end of the 2015 Super Bowl. This
commentary
was also enjoyable.
18jan2015
- What Every High School Junior Should Know About Going to College
- Perhaps the most straightforward and practical advice I’ve seen for
what to expect from college. The macro-economic
view
is also interesting.
- The Son Also Rises
- Adding this to my reading list. Clark shows that social mobility is
slower than we think, and every family’s socio-economic status will
eventually regress to the mean. Genetics dominates whether or not
children will be successful and not the wealth of their parents.
- SSL Pulse
- Survey of SSL implementations of popular web sites. You can submit
your own site for immediate scoring.
- Gitit
- Git-based wiki that uses Pandoc for markup processing and supports
plugins written in Haskell for dynamic page rendering.
- Smells Like Teen Spirit
- Arresting music video of Patti
Smith’s cover.
2014 End of Year Booklist
This summer I decided to read more and higher-quality writing. I reduced the time I spent reading on the Internet to maybe twenty minutes a day and set aside time to read books instead. Looking back, I am happy I did it.
I think the biggest disappointment were the business books (Horowitz, Catmull, and Brooks). They are fun stories, but the lessons that can be applied to my own work are few and far between. Contrast those books with Truman, for example, which inspired leadership and courage when making difficult decisions. I hope to read one or two more biographies in 2015.
The fiction I read was delightful. Almost all the authors on the list were new to me, and I managed to cover some diverse ground, everything from struggling marriages to fly fishing to post-apocalyptic communes. Far from being an escape, these books encouraged more creative thinking and gave me some badly-needed decompression from work.
Here are my lists force-ranked from really great to just ok. I omitted a few stinkers.
Nonfiction
Fiction
07dec2014
- Linux Hater’s Blog
- This seems to have gone inactive, but there are many really funny
posts.
- What is Docker?
- Docker has gotten popular this year. It seems to be a practical
approach to the configuration management problem for distributed
systems. If it works, this helps free engineering time to focus on
system design and fault tolerance, where the truly hard work is.
- Mean People Fail
- It’s no surprise that Internet startup founders are nice. The more
interesting question is when do you _have_ to be mean to succeed
so that you can avoid getting into that trap.
- The Pentagon Details Its Weapons-for-Cops Giveaway
- My local police department got a $692,000 "mine-resistant
vehicle." Ridiculous.
23nov2014
- What’s New in GnuPG 2.1
- GnuPG 2.1 is out. Support for elliptic curve cryptography and
improved local key management infrastructure.
- ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption
- STARTTLS downgrade attacks primarily against server-to-server email
communication. A good example of complexity in the whole application
infrastructure that makes it hard to guarantee privacy at any layer.
The user is the last backstop; use your own encryption like GnuPG if
privacy is important.
- IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality
- Meanwhile, the IAB encourages designers to take a "you can’t trust
anybody else and you have to to trust everybody else" position,
which is no help at all.
- Let’s Encrypt
- At least the EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, and a few others are trying to
make transport-layer security ubiquitous by supporting a no-charge
certificate authority.
- Slack
- Lef’Jab, commercialized.
09nov2014
- Public NetHack Server
- NetHack lives on. The 2014 tournament
is underway.
- OpenTrons
- OpenTrons is a Kickstarter project for automating basic genomic
sample prep.
- Secure Messaging Scorecard
- The EFF rates many mobile messaging applications as part of their
campaign for secure and usable crypto software.
- No Deadlines for You!
- The methodology is sound, but it skirts a number of real-life
problems: business issues are rarely so crisp. It can be hard to map
the problem to a solution, much less something actionable against
product design. Still, my highest-performing teams practice this
effectively. A must-read.
26oct2014
- Is Weak Typing Strong Enough
- Practical assessment of statically-typed vs. dynamically-typed
languages. He uses Java and Perl as examples from the day, but the
reasoning applies to C# and Scheme just as well now.
- Why Inequality Matters
- Great review of Captial in the Twenty-First Century by Bill Gates.
This book has been on my reading list for a while. I’ll get to it
some day if I can ever get through Truman.
- Autumn is tilde.club
- Advertising-based social networks are evil, but I haven’t seen a
viable, alternative revenue model yet. Ello won’t last (but I like
it’s ‘zine feel). As for
tilde.club, I won’t participate, but it sure
makes me nostalgic.
- Ghost History
- History of one of my favorite Phish tunes. Although not listed, the
2009 Festival 8 performance is one of my personal favorites because
of Trey’s guitar setup that night for the band’s musical costume
(The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street).
05oct2014
- The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Life
- Thought-provoking. I know a few small-business owners who outsource
regularly because 1) there is almost no difference between life and
work, and 2) there is simply no way you can have the skill to do
everything yourself. "Wealthy households" in the 18th and 19th
centuries were also small businesses. On the other side, you can see
the cons all around us in this generation.
- Why I Just Asked My Students to Put Their Laptops Away
- Clay Shirky on dismissing electronic devices from his classroom.
Interesting point: distractions have grown when the only variable is
the devices being brought to class. Strong points on the impact of
distractions on cognitive development as well.
- The 2014 Sinqfield Cup
- Nice read to catch up on the state of international chess with lots
of good links. There are hints of the impact of Internet-based chess
play in preparation for competitions, something that would be
interesting to know more about.
Over the last couple of months I’ve started reading more books and
fewer Internet posts. The reason is time. Work has been intense and will
continue to be so for the forseeable future. The quality of books is
also very high compared to almost everything on the ‘Net. There just
isn’t time to browse anymore, and this has shown in the frequency of my
linklog posts in 2014. I’ll continue to post links, but I am also going
to try posting comments on books I’m reading. This may or may not grow
into full reviews but hopefully will give you some ideas for your own
reading list.
14sep2014
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics
- Complete text available for online reading. If you’ve heard
recordings of Feynman lecturing, the text will read almost exactly
as you would imagine him delivering the material.
- Marian Rejewski and the First Break into Enigma
- Monthly essay from the American Mathematical Society explaining some
of the mathematics used in the cryptanalysis of the German Engima
cipher before World War II.
- A Watch Guy’s Thoughts on the Apple Watch
- Great first impressions of the watch from a serious watch
afficianado.
24aug2014
- Pinboard Turns Five
- Witty reflection on Pinboard’s first years from its developer.
Remarkably mature perspective.
- A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year
- And an interesting contrast with running a business based on a paid
iOS application.
- Invisible Corporations, Part Two
- Some insight into development cultures at Google and Amazon, useful
for helping to frame your own company’s culture.
- How to be Polite
- Extremely well written. Another pathway to systematizing human
interaction. Sign me up.
- Second Variety
- The origin of the Terminator franchise. This short story by PK Dick
is free on the Kindle bookstore if you happen to use a Kindle.
20jul2014
- Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services
- Practice report of how Amazon has used TLA+ to eliminate design bugs
in their distributed systems.
- Corporate OpenSource Anti-Patterns
- Bryan Cantrill’s talk on how companies can avoid mistakes in
sponsoring open source projects.
- The Developer’s Dystopian Future
- Sentiments also
shared by
others.
- Robots Will Pave the Way to Mars
- Outlines some of the problems with and possible solutions to getting
around Earth’s gravity well in order to start building real
infrastructure in space.
- What Problems to Solve
- Letter from Richard Feynman to a former student.
25may2014
- The TeX Tuneup of 2014
- Knuth’s periodic look at bug reports and resulting changes to TeX,
Metafont, and Computer Modern. Typical Knuth humor and precision.
- Twenty Questions for Don Knuth
- Written Q&A with Knuth and a number of legendary figures in Computer
Science (Tarjan, Steele, Bentley, etc). Many of the questions are as
interesting as the answers.
- Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT
- They’ve integrated LLVM as the fourth tier of their Javascript JIT
compiler. How they handle garbage collection and their notion of hot
loop transfers are especially interesting.
- Please Put OpenSSL Out of its Misery
- Scathing opion in ACM Queue but no real solution offered. Surely
rewriting from scratch is not the answer. The LibreSSL project is
probably not the answer. Investing some money to get design
continuity and support some developers full-time is a better answer.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- An exploration of quality. Pirsig pushes into both epistimology and
metaphysics while exploring the concept. There is some overlap with
Dewey’s "Art as Experience." Highly recommended for anybody
trying to design for experience and grappling with both the
"romantic" and "rational" aspects of design quality.
- Ex Libris Anonymous
- I gave these notbooks a try, and they make great gifts for anybody
who draws or writes or keeps notes.
20apr2014
- Thinking for Programmers
- Talk at Microsoft’s Build 2014 conference by Turing
Award-winner
Leslie Lamport. His thesis is that writing specifications, in
varying degrees of formality, is critical to getting software design
right. Introduces a little TLA+ as a way of verifying distributed
systems.
- Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review
- The authors find that developers peer review code mostly to find
better solutions to problems and to learn from one another. Removing
bugs isn’t the primary reason. Suggests where to take code review
and analysis tools. Also indirectly supports Lamport’s thesis in
the above-linked talk.
- Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)
- Agile is an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and
products, but the four core values still hold.
15mar2014
- Critical TLS/SSL Flaw in Apple Operating Systems
- A simple coding error; probably a cut-and-paste mistake. I would
love to know what the root cause analysis of the mistake looked like
inside Apple. Also, you have to assume that US, Chinese, and other
intelligence agencies have automated attacks on every operating
system release and knew about the mistake as soon as it got into the
wild.
- Mt. Gox Files U.S. Bankruptcy
- Supposedly, Mt. Gox was run by a Magic the Gathering
site, so now I’m
surprised Mt. Gox held up this long.
- John McAfee’s Setup
- Hilarious, especially some of the linked YouTube videos. As an
aside, I like that usesthis.com has expanded
to interview people who use technology to actually get something
done besides write code, build web sites, etc. It helps to put the
latest Web bubble in better perspective.
22feb2014
- William Faulkner’s Nobel Banquet Speech
- A writer’s job is to find and document the human condition despite
the emptiness of our everyday lives. Given in 1950, in the middle of
the cold war, the threat of our destruction today may not be so
great, but the threat to our spirit has never been more real.
- The Passion Gospel
- More nails in the coffin of technology startup culture. A must read,
especially if you have a family.
- Our Love Affair with the Tablet is Over
- I mostly agree with this assessment after using an iPad Mini as my
only iOS device for the last year. I won’t get another tablet.
01feb2014
- Software in 2014
- Tim Bray on the state of software development in 2014. Nothing
surprising and nice to have a frustrating client-side landscape
validated. It’s sad that all the energy is in creating less capable
interfaces in mobile and browser-based environments. UI design is
taking a big step backward because of technology change.
- Meanwhile at code.org
- A reminder that Seymour Papert was trying to teach children to
reason about mathematical ideas and that programming was a means to
an end, not the end itself. This is a reaction to
code.org’s mission to bring programming to
secondary schools.
- Bitcoin - The Internet of Money
- This author is optimistic about the opportunity to disrupt the
financial sector, but he is still not very clear on what problems
need to be solved...
- Can Do vs Can’t Do Cultures
- ...And related to that, Andreesen Horowitz has invested in Bitcoin,
and Ben Horowitz suggests that people stop hating on Bitcoin just
because we don’t know what to do with it yet.
- How Netflix Reinvented HR
- This is a recent version of Netflix’s culture deck. There is an
interview with Netflix’s CEO, but you will have to pay for a copy
of it if not already subscribing to HBR. Caution: you have to
consider what Netflix is doing in the context of your own industry
to evaluate if all they do makes sense.
- Trey Anastasio Band 2014 Winter Tour
- TAB started their winter tour last week which will end in
Indianapolis on February 15. Set lists and torrents of audience
tapes are here.
Scott Schneider’s recordings of the Denver shows are pretty good.
22dec2013
- Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology
- Essay from Alex Payne using the Bitcoin experiment as an example of
how pioneering technologists want to ignore the social and economic
ramifications of their work. Lots of interesting links. I’m still
looking for a serious and comprehensive analysis of Bitcoin and the
economic assumtions it challenges.
- How the Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works
- Construction of the bitcoin protocol from the ground up focusing on
the double-spend problem.
- Indiana State Police Tracking Cellphones
- It’s not news that domestic law enforcement collects cellphone
data, but it’s alarming that a warrant isn’t required, and
furthermore there are no clear data retention and access policies.
- Designing for Exponential Trends of 2014
- Must read if you are a software or system designer. Many of the
suggestions apply more broadly than the consumer product space.
- Lessons from Org Structures
- It’s reorg time of year in the United States.
08dec2013
- Don’t be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous Email Accounts
- Practical advice on how to create and maintain an anonymous webmail
identity without linking it to your real identity.
- Online Anonymity Is Not Only for Trolls and Political Dissidents
- Which of course begs the question, "Why would you want online
anonymity?" Here’s why.
- Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
- Takes away the need for a centralized (and corruptable) clearing
house for transactions. Lessens the power of central government.
Leans the administrative overhead of an off-world colony. Bitcoin is
a specialization of this protocol.
- An Evening with Ray Bradbury
- A one-hour talk by Ray Bradbury late in his life with stories about
his love of reading and writing. Great motivation to find
high-quality writing to read. Starts to ramble a bit after the first
half-hour.
- Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 2 of 4
- One of my favorite interviews of all time. The best quote from this
segment: "Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning
crap."
24nov2013
- The Internet Ideology: Why We are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley
- The "digital debate," as Silicon Valley wants to frame it,
accomplishes nothing without understanding the political, social,
and economic systems that technology amplifies or dampens. Without
changing the debate, we will continue to get rolled by the
military-industrial complex and out-of-control banking and
advertising industries. Money quote: "Letting Google organize all
the world’s information makes as much sense as letting Halliburton
organize all of the world’s oil."
- Bill Gates: Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World
- And here’s an example of how Bill Gates’s “catalytic
philanthropy” backs technology bets evaluated in the context of
political and social change for the better.
- Our Seven Privacies: The Many Important Facets of Privacy
- A way to structure the complex idea of "privacy" in order to
evaluate how the tools and technology we use affect it.
- The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
- Requiring OSS contributions for a job is unethical and unnecessary.
- Microsoft Warns Customers Away from RC4 and SHA-1
- Recommends switching to TLS 1.2 for email. If you are running
Dovecot and openssh 1.0.1 then you are
set. As for
GnuPG, you will need to check your signing key and modify the
preferences to get away from SHA-1. An example of how to do this is
shown
here.
- Realities of Performance Appraisal
- Pretty good recommendations for how to work a complex and tricky
process in large organizations. Recommended for managers.
10nov2013
- Unreliable Research: Trouble in the Lab
- Explains some of the pitfalls in null hypothesis testing and more
when applying statistics to experimental results. Becoming convinced
that basic statistics and probability is as important as Calculus
for an educated generation.
- United States Department of Defense Open Source Software FAQ
- There’s no excuse for any company to not embrace OSS. The FAQ and
linked memos and reports represent a more thoughtful analysis than
any single company is likely to do.
- iOS 7 and the Iconography of ‘Alien’
- Function over form in iOS 7 icon design.
- Thoughts on Reviewing Tech Products
- Software tools for intellectual work are complex because they do
complex things. You can’t review them in a few hours or even a few
days. Interesting to consider when redesigning old products for new
use cases and new users.
- Devil’s Dictionary of Programming
- I especially like the definitions of "DSL" and "disrupt."
27oct2013
- Who Does That Server Really Serve?
- Essay by Richard Stallman on services as software substitutes and
how they can take away your freedom.
- The Dead Drops Manifesto
- Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file sharing
network in public spaces. This started as a media art project in NYC
in 2010. The quintessential art as
experience.
- Silk Road Founder Arrested
- The US FBI seized 144,000 bitcoins after the arrest. Bitcoin is now
trading about 35% higher than before his arrest.
- Sovereign
- A set of Ansible playbooks to build and maintain a private cloud.
It’s a neat concept for documenting a configuration setup. Portions
of it are based on this
post
describing how to set up a modern email stack.
- Why Microsoft Word Must Die
- Interesting bit of history on why MS Word evolved the way it did. I
still favor (La)TeX despite the steep learning curve. Nothing else I
know will scale and stay professional.
- Giving Testers Less to do
- Echos the test stategy I like: most automated testing done by the
development team and only light automated testing done by the test
team. Let the test team focus on creative, deeper testing that may
only be partially automated.
- On the Exploitation of APIs
- Interesting take on the definition and evolution of system APIs.
29sep2013
- How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap
- Flawed. Web 2.0 is a replacement for television, and the money in
that market is coming from traditional advertising. It’s a mistake
to call the time people spend on these websites "labor" any more
than sitting on the couch watching TV is "labor." There is no new
wealth being created, and it’s dangerous to think there is.
- Metadata Equals Surveillance
- Metadata can be used for 1) traffic analysis, and 2) coalescing
multiple online identities into one actual profile. It’s all NSA
needs to tell the UK’s
GCHQ
to tell the FBI where to raid.
- Usability in Free Software
- How to conduct usability testing on the cheap and with distributed
teams. Love the tip of doing testing at shopping malls.
- Factoring RSA Keys from Certified Smart Cards
- There are weak keys being using with SSH, mostly because of problems
in random-number generators. Also provides a service to check your
own SSH public keys.
- Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer
- Complete raytracer that fits on the back of a business card.
- 8 Steps for Engineering Leaders to Keep the Peace
- Dealing with the reality of resource and time constraints in product
development.
22sep2013
- N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web
- We should assume SSL and TLS traffic can be broken by organizations
with power.
- Our Newfound Fear of Risk
- Here’s the dilemma: individuals are terrible at assessing risk
because we are human. On the other hand, organizations can’t assess
risks well either but for sociological reasons.
- Open Wide
- Private capital damages open commons, and online, it destroys the
communities enabled by Web 2.0 platforms. If we are going to take
back the Internet, is a Web 3.0 with decentralized communities a
part of that?
- Tahoe-LAFS
- A decentralized store resistant to compromised nodes. It leaves the
privacy to the application layer, and there is no story for
anonymous read/write.
- The Infrastructure Engineers Guide to Entrepreneurship
- The premise is that infrastructure engineers can build companies
offering platform infrastructure, but this presupposes that
customers will know they need it before they’ve build a pile of
code on top of quicksand. Still interesting for some of the advice.
08sep2013
- Institutions versus Collaboration
- Bitcoin is going to do to finance what blogging did to journalism.
Shirky’s talk explains the pattern. This might be the pacifist
version of Fight Club.
- Looking inside the (Drop)box
- The client is the enemy.
- My favorite RSS reader, Feedbin.me, goes open source!
- I switched to feedbin.me about six weeks ago and didn’t look back.
So much better than Feedly.
- Inventing on Principle
- A talk by Bret Victor with two themes. One is user interface design
based on immediate connection to data and computation. It’s not a
new concept (and he knows it). The
second is about principles and using them to guide your career
choices. Reminds me of Simon Sinek’s excellent TED
talk
about starting with "why?".
- Beyond the ‘Boards: The Taping Tradition Lives On
- Phish’s 2013 summer tour is over with several great shows and great
recordings being distributed by bittorrent at
etree.org.
25aug2013
- A Personalized Companion for Older People
- Very cool prototype from a European consortium working on multiple
approaches to embedding sensors and actuators into the home
environment of the elderly.
- Kivo: Making Powerpoint Collaboration Painless
- Uses git for the back end. I’m going to kill myself trying to
collaborate with marketing using Sharepoint. Brilliant to start with
slides since the granularity of edits is so much coarser than
spreadsheets and documents.
- Butterick’s Practical Typography
- Full of practical advice on how to get decent-looking documents out
of standard word processors. Think of it as a practical version of
the Elements of Typographic
Style.
Note: LaTeX gets most of this correct out of the box.
- Tech Industry Slips into Surprising Slump
- People aren’t buying the crap the tech industry is making. Big
surprise.
- A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto
- Seems like a good time to revisit this. The cypherpunks failed, and
we’re all paying for it now. There should be another try at this
with more focus on practical operational security needs.
- FTL: Faster Than Light
- A rouge-like space simulation game. Lots of fun and very much like
Rogue in the core game mechanics. Downside is that it lacks the
charm and humor that has made Nethack endure for 20+ years. (Well,
20+ years for me.)
- Tahoe Tweezer
- With only Dick’s left in Phish’s 2013 summer tour, this Tweezer
has emerged as the best jam of the year, and some are saying it’s
the best in Phish’s history. Clocks in at 36 minutes but worth
listening to every minute of it.
18aug2013
- The Art of Lisp and Writing
- Reprint of the forward to "Successful Lisp: How to Understand and
Use Common Lisp." Two ideas: engineering precedes science in most
cases, and programming is both discovery and refinement at the same
time. Gabriel draws parallels to writing to make the latter point.
- Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox
- Advice not just for founders but anybody who started out but is no
longer directly responsible for product. This is also more grist for
the definition of product-oriented leaders versus bean counters.
- Licensing in a Post Copyright World
- The current state of open source software licensing. Frankly, I had
not realized that the GPL was in such a mess. Worth a read if using
open source components in commercial work.
- Eisenhower, Snowden and the military industrial complex
- Cyberwarfare is the new frontier for the military industrial
complex. It’ll consume trillions in funding over the rest of my
life. I’m still trying to figure out what good will come of it for
computer science and software engineering.
- 20 Years Later: Remembering the Murat
- 2003 was a breakout year for Phish with the evolution of the Type 2
jam. The August 13 show at the
Murat Theater in Indianapolis was a highlight from that tour.
Bathtub Gin gets all the comments, but the whole show is great.
- Mating Habits of the North American Hipster
- Just perfect. Poor audio, so read along during the performance.
09jun2013
- Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup
- Perspective on startups as just another class of company with pros
and a lot of cons. A good reminder that a startup is a means to an
end and that with the end in mind, there are many ways to get there.
- Are Coders Worth It?
- Another take on the startup environment for web-based software
development. The bottom line? Web developers are today’s high-tech
ditch diggers.
- The Pixar Way
- Recent interview with Ed Catmull, one of my personal role models,
talking about how Pixar works to make films. Touches a lot on team
dynamics and how to manage creative teams.
- A Week with Elixir
- Joe Armstrong’s notes on Elixir, a ruby-inspired syntax for a
language that targets the Erlang VM. Generally positive.
- Is Phish a Great Band?
- Free-ranging article that finally makes a good point about the
future of the business. Regardless, a must-link because it’s about
Phish.
19may2013
- On Thingpunk
- We’re not fleeing from digital design. We’re fleeing from
postmodernism, which we all knew wasn’t going to last anyway.
Better integration of technology is the next big design movement.
- The Vo96
- Extremely cool acoustic synthesizer for guitars. Works by inducing
the guitar’s strings to produce the desired waveforms.
- Stop Drawing Dead Fish
- Lecture by Bret Victor on interactive art as what a computer makes
possible. High potential. With sufficient simulation and control,
can computers enable a high-tech performance exceeding a marionette
performance? Is this what Pixar aims for, only residualizing their
final performance to film? What if the capability existed for any
group of high school students to do their own performance of Toy
Story?
- David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech
- Commencement speech given at Kenyon in 2005. The power of knowing
how to think is choosing what to think about and the perspective
from which to think about it. The genesis of most great ideas is
rooted in the ability to do this fluently.
- Innovation Starvation
- Old but worth a relink. We’re not executing on the big stuff.
21apr2013
- Red and green callbacks
- Boils down, to its essence, exactly why we’re using Erlang’s
concurrency model where I work.
- Concurrent revisions
- Deterministic concurrency model that I like a lot better than
software transactional memory.
- Surviving legacy code
- Good essay on how to think about legacy code bases and approach
changing them.
- Mozilla and Samsung collaborate on next generation web browser engine
- Mostly interested in how Rust develops, and building a rendering
engine with it is a great way to find out.
- Blink: a rendering engine for the Chromium project
- Meanwhile Google announces their fork of WebKit to push their own
multi-process architecture for rendering. It’s a design competition
now.
- How to survive in design (and a zombie apocolypse)
- Motivation to pick up tools like Quartz Composer for interaction
designs with animation, even if they have a steep learning curve.
- Photography’s third act
- Using photos for communication.
31mar2013
- What’s actually wrong with Yahoo’s purchase of Summly
- Blistering critique of bolt-on engineering.
- Logic programming is overrated
- In Q4 2012 a vibe on my Internet was "hardware is cool again."
Lately a vibe has been, "why don’t you startup kids come back when
you’ve accomplished something technically significant."
- Being a leader, not a micromanaging editor
- This is an incredibly fine line. Sometimes teaching is done by
editing side-by-side. Sometimes it is very difficult to articulate
what "good" looks like. I’m certainly not perfect, and there is
some good advice here.
- Checkboxes that kill your product
- I’m still proud to this day that we shipped SAMI EX without a
preferences dialog, and DxLab had just a few options.
- Computer science in Vietnam
- Start kids early and give them a lot of headroom. Fraser reiterates
that in the US we think there is no time for teaching programming.
What does the rest of the Vietnamese curriculum look like?
- Charlie Miller turns his transferring sights on Phish
- I keep seeing Charlie Miller’s name on Grateful Dead and Phish
transfers at etree. There are two crowds: they guys doing the taping
and the guys doing the transfers.
- Music for programming
- Electronica with no vocals. Works well for me. Available as MP3s and
also published via podcast in iTunes.
10mar2013
- Beyond consumption versus creation
- Considering computing devices based on task complexity and task
duration. Useful when thinking about what portion of an application
to put on a mobile device, if any.
- OAuth 2.0 and the road to hell
- Design by committee war story with bits of the cultural differences
between Enterprise IT and the rest of the world.
- Jony Ive on Blue Peter
- You can find something positive to say about any design.
- About Hacker School
- What if you had a residence program for a high-tech startup
incubator? What if you had a development
co-op that borrowed this idea?
- The GitHub Generation
- Big implications for software design: where does top-down and
bottom-up design meet? How do you reason about properties that
don’t compose like performance and memory usage? Now think through
how we’ll fix these problems when "open" is applied to other
domains like legal code and school curriculum design.
- The Art of Improvisation
- Phish keyboardist Page McConnell’s senior study while he was at
Godard
24feb2013
- Balancing tradeoffs across different customers
- Designing for two very different groups of people: end users and IT
professionals.
- What your culture really says
- Calling out stereotypical startup culture. Is this perspective
because the author is a woman or an adult?
- Role models
- Bob Cringely’s history of PARC including the roots of Dealer.
- The process myth
- Healthy process defends itself. I see a lot that doesn’t.
- Vim after 11 years
- Interesting perspective and list of extensions from someone who came
to vim late. I don’t agree that lack of refactoring and smart
completion is a liability.
- Tumblr is not what you think
- Dead-on correct assessment based on what I’m seeing in my own
household.
- Phish 9/1/2012 Light
- This is being called the best jam of Phish’s 2012 summer tour.
Truly epic.
10feb2013
- Your massively offline college is broken
- Clay Shirky continuing the debate on what software and the Internet
will do to higher education. It’s a crazy time to be putting kids
into college.
- The exceptional beauty of Doom 3’s source code
- Two words: minimal templates.
- Functional programming in C++
- John Carmack gives some practical reasons for why and how to use
functional programming in C++.
- Focus on work, not the methodology
- Good ideas, but you have to remember that in any real company,
funding and governance are as important as actually building the
software.
- Hey extraverts, enough is enough
- Please leave us alone so we can get some work done.
(Format inspired by Trivium.)
17jan2013
- Mars Code
- Talk covering techniques they used for developing the Curiosity’s
software. Some good war stories and practical advice for building
high-quality software.
- Why and How People Use R
- Not a very technical talk but some good points for anybody designing
domain-specific languages they want people to use.
- Trey Anastasio’s Guitar Rig
- Two parts; Part two is
here.
