Knowledge Worker’s Dream

I recently remembered the most amazing story that I’ve read 5 or 6 years ago, and my wife found the book that contains it yesterday. The book is called “Fairy Tales For Computers“. , and the story is “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.

The story was written in 1909 and since it’s in public domain now, so the full text of it is online.

It’s a story of a future in which people live in small apartments underground, all cared for by an almost Matrix-style machine, communicating almost exclusively through telepresence.

“‘Who is it?’ she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”

“Vashanti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation – a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music. “

Living constantly communicating with hundreds or even thousands of correspondents, looking for and generating “ideas”, being served by and cared for by automatons – isn’t that a knowledge worker’s dream? Are you scared yet? Don’t “accumulations of the last three minutes” strike you familiar? Your inbox, your livejournal “friends” feed?

Too bad that “A Logic Named Joe” is not out of copyright. These two stories together are an irrefutable proof of time travel. But none of you will read it, so nobody will believe me anyway.

Wanke Wanker, Nike Style Developers and The Big Secret

An interesting article about Windows developers:

“This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or “punted,” to the next Windows release–Longhorn–if they’re not sufficiently problematic.
….
On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, “F#$% ’em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It’s in Longhorn. Next bug. “

I bet that when Dave Cutler was around, nobody missed meetings like that. Probably because Cutler would have punted them.

And this is just a good proof of what Joel keeps saying about superstar developers :
“I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, ‘just go and fix it.’ One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows] .NET Server. Let’s just say that there are people I trust, and people I don’t trust. I told these guys, ‘don’t tell me what you’re doing. Just do it.”

From the first part of the article
“Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn’t have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That’s why we called it NT, because it worked on the ‘N-Ten.’ “

Huh. Now they tell us.

Post While Waiting For Defragmentor: Blogger Exultant

My favorite modern science fiction writer, John C. Wright, Esq. , also started a livejournal, . I must warn you, that Mr. Wright is as controversial as he is brilliant. A retired lawyer and journalist, Libertarian turned Conservative, a self described Christian Atheist and Stoic he is nothing like a common livejournal blogger.

I strongly urge you to buy Year’s Best SF 3, a book containing a short story called “Guest Law”. This story made me a big fan. Copies of Year’s Best SF can be had for as little as 50 cents + shipping at Amazon.

Unfortunately Mr. Wright’s other short stories are rather hard to obtain, but you absolutely must get his Phoenix Exultant trilogy books. I’ve read the first two volumes and I can’t wait for the third one to come out.

The only thing short story of Mr. Wright’s that is available online is a William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land tribute titled “Awake in the Night“. Now, I am a staunch detractor of the fantasy genre. And I absolutely hate fan fiction. In this case I am willing to make an exception. Yeah, yeah, you heard me say that. But even though
“Awake in the Night” is a very good read and it revealed to me Night Land books which I will definitely pursue, I still wish it was an original Wright story instead of a tribute.

It’s Almost Lunch!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Had a pretty good dream this morning. I was working on a project with . We were building a gigantic mecha robot. I was surprised with the efficiency of my work. I accomplished much more than I thought I would. My task was building a whole bunch of rack mounted compartments, including the main radio. The robot was about the size of the 5 story building I live in.

I guess this dream is pretty easy to interpret. First of all I am planning to rebuild all of my computers in inexpensive rack mount cases (these things sell for about $60-100 a pop on eBay). I’ll also probably get a cheap and slow, but sexy 1 unit rack mount computer for an mp3 file server, home automation and other always-on type services. They are also within a range of a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Second, I came up with an idea last night. There’s an application that I want to write. First I got to make sure nobody else has written it already. It’s gonna be extra awesome!

Now for a bunch of unrelated cool news:

1) Google started spidering livejournal and other blogs again! Sergey probably read my rant and repented. Yep, that’s what it must have been. Oh, and google’s new toolbar is so damn awesome. It even has a popup blocker. http://www.livejournal.com/users/deadprogrammer has pagerank of 4, but deadprogrammer.com – of 1. Link to me more, people.

2) Some Cubans tried to reach the US Junkyard Wars style, in a 1951 Chevy with pontoons and an engine driven prop. I can’t believe Coast Guard sent them back. That just sucks!

No Lunch For Deadprogrammer

I haven’t lost much weight in the last few months on the Atkins diet and I am still nowhere near my target weight. And I am not cheating, really. So the three pronged approach must be tried.

A) Forcing myself to eat breakfast, late lunch and having no dinner
B) Cutting down on coffee and artificial sweeteners
C) Going to gym more often than once every two weeks.

So, instead of lunch today I’ll do a little post. I need to come up with a good name for this kind of a post. Slashdot calls it “Slashback”. I can’t come up with something witty. Little help?

In any case, here goes:

Very talented brings us The Matrix and Terminator in the Russian lubok style. He’s also the one who placed Cheburashka, the Soviet Pokemon in the world of Star Wars and The Matrix. I’ve seen the images floating around in journals for a while, but they never revealed the author. Don’t you hate that?

Nobody expects the Mozilla developers! Mozilla is rather nice right now. Two features really make the difference – tabs and popup blocking. And favicon.ico rendering that isn’t broken. Three features. And NT challenge/response support. Four. And proper keyboard shortcuts. Five.

Tabbed browsing is absolutely perfect for journal reading. Unfortunately from time to time the browser window doesn’t refresh and becomes a jumble of screen layers forcing me to restart the browser. The same thing happens to Trillian sometimes. Does anybody know how to fix that?

I am listening a lot to Kora music. Djelika by Toumani Diabate is oh so amazing. You really, really got to get it. This is the best coding music ever. What’s a bit funny is that Mr. Diabate quotes the theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” in the title piece. It’s just so awesome! Just listen to the sample at Amazon. Don’t even listen, just buy the damn CD. Did I ever recommend anything bad?

got me interested in the Chapman Stick. At first I though it was a kind of a Theremin. I tried listening to a classical recording of Theremin, but didn’t like it.

But it turned out that the Stick is something very different. And also hella cool:

“… One piece, Backyard, that appears on the album was used in the film Dune. The director’s cut of the film shows a decorated Stick painted gold playing the role of the mythical “baliset” instrument described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Emmett’s recording is what we hear when we see Patrick Stewart play the baliset.”

I really want to get a cd of “Parallel Galaxy”, but can’t seem to find one for sale.

Lunch is over.

I’d Like Some Shareware For Lunch

There are 3 pieces of shareware that I’ve been using for a long time and like very much. They are:

Clipmate by Thornsoft Development – a little app that lives in the system tray and keeps the history of everything that is copied and pasted. It also lets you keep organized collections of “copies” and allows you to paste them in rapid succession. It can also do encryption, spell checking and other things as well.

Trillian by Cerulean Studios – everybody’s favorite instant messaging client

Powermarks by Kaylon Technologies – a very, very, very good bookmark manager.

I am also using Snippets by SoftCircuits, but I am looking to replace it with some other hierarchical database. It has been at version 1.51 for many years, there is no development planned and it doesn’t have many of the features that I need.

All of these programs a worth the money that I paid many times over. I wish I bought them earlier.

Right now I am shopping for a hierarchical storage database / outliner (something like Mybase or Treepad, but I can’t decide because there are so many choices). I am also looking for an anti-spam tool (on big requirement is being able to look through my mail client and clean out the stuff that is already there, not only the new stuff that is arriving), a popup and ad killer (something like the now defunct Popup Killer, ) and probably a personal firewall in addition to the one in my router.

The common problems with shareware products are :
a) Priced too high (over $30) like Lyris Mailshield
b) The evaluation version is severely disabled like Axon Idea Processor
c) Given away for too small a fee or altogether for free, causing the development to stop like the Popup Killer which I mentioned already or even more so, like Semagic Livejournal client.

Which shareware programs do you like? Any recommendations?

Journal News

I will be eliminating , my Russian journal. I will repost some of the stuff from there in .
In addition to badly floundering community, I just created . I’ll put my subway rants there. While there will be few subscribers, I will be crossposting in my own journal.

Unfortunately, there is no “plugging” mechanism in livejournal. I would love to get more readers, but there is no easy way to promote my journal and communities. I think I’ve seen a post about a feature like that in someone’s blog, but I can’t find the link. I need a good url manager. In any way, plugs are appreciated here, at Deadprogrammer Inc.

Also, here’s a beef I have with you, readers. Every time I ask for some interesting blog recommendations you are silent. What’s up with that? Don’t you know any good journals?