Bug Blogger

We Ride the NYC Century

A few of us at Bug Labs are avid cyclists.  We brave the traffic every morning and every evening as we commute to and from work.  To us, biking in this city is a joy.  We wanted to share our joy and experience with other riders and potential commuters and so we signed up to be marshals for this year's NYC Century Bike Tour.

Yesterday Ken, Melinda, Matt, his wife Cindy, their one year old son, and I made our way up to the top of Central Park at 7:30 in the morning and rode with groups of riders across New York.  We were given red vests and our job was to lead groups of people along the ride and to help anyone who was having trouble.  Most of the time moral support was all we needed to give.  I spoke to a few people during the ride who were on their bikes for the first time in years, or had never been to Brooklyn before, or had never ridden on the streets of Manhattan.

Transportation is an important issue to all Americans.  Our "car culture" is fueled, from a historical perspective, by frontierism and a sense of rugged individualism, and, from a contemporary perspective, by cheap oil, war, the automobile lobby, and habit. In a dense city like New York, transportation is an especially important issue.  Cars are not sustainable or practical, and, in fact, most city dwellers don't use cars on a daily basis.  We are forced to find alternative forms of transportation.

There is an advocacy group here in the city that strives to raise awareness and change the laws to undo the destructive force of a culture dependent on automobiles.  The organization is suitably named Transportation Alternatives.  Transportation Alternatives runs countless events every year, but one of the city's favorites is the annual NYC Century Bike Tour.  This bike tour takes place every September and offers a number of rides for people of all abilities. It gives both out-of-towners and New Yorkers a chance to see the city in the best way many of us can imagine--from a bike.  The annual ride also creates awareness among those who don't participate.  Taxi drivers, delivery people, and pedestrians out for a Sunday morning stroll all notice the seemingly endless stream of happy faces rolling by on bikes the day of the ride.

At one point in the ride I was at an intersection in Brooklyn, one very near where I live, with a group of riders.  When the light turned green I started heading straight, taking the route I normally take on my commute as if I was on auto-pilot.  A couple of riders behind me were confused.  On the turn-sheet, it indicated that I should have taken a left.  We went back to the turn to stay with the turn-sheet, but the moment reminded me that I was sharing something familiar with people for whom it was brand new.  Taking a short-cut was not the point.  Showing this group how awesome Brooklyn is from a bike was the point.  Helping out on the ride was perhaps a tiny, localized step, but it was also part of the greater strides Transportation Alternatives makes with events like the NYC Century Bike Tour.

Committing to Open Source

I'm not married, but I am aware of the traditional wedding vows, the vows that say "for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish," and on.  Now, getting married is probably the most important commitment anyone can make in their lives and, despite the statistics, I see more successful marriages than failures.  This leads me to one clear and obvious thought:  With so many people capably committing to spending their lives with another, why is everyone still using Windows?

Most people, afraid of the open source software commitment, simply use the OS that comes on their computers, which is probably Windows.  They may use Firefox or some other open source software, which is akin to dating open source, but until you boot the Ubuntu live CD and ceremonially repartition your hard drive to install Linux, you haven't committed.

Committing to OSS used to be much harder than getting married.  In the olden days it would take a village  (Linux, btw, comes with a huge village known as the OSS community) just to get the NIC working.  But that was before Ubuntu.  With Ubuntu Linux, in many ways more so than in Windows Vista, things just work.  Sure, Linux might take some getting used to in the beginning, but once you've adjusted to your new partner, you'll find that poorer and sickness just don't happen as much as they did before you got hitched.

Here's a short list of some vital open source software that you'll be using as your relationship with OSS progresses.  Most of these can actually be installed on Windows if you still just want to date:  Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird of course; OpenOffice.org, an excellent alternative to Word; VLC, a swiss-army-knife-like movie player; GIMP instead of Photoshop; Inkscape instead of Illustrator; ClamAV for your anti-virus, and many other OS tools such as gThumb, Xine, and gEdit which come with most desktop distros running Gnome.

So install it already.  Take the plunge.  Use one of the friendlier distros, like Ubuntu.  This is an excellent chance to breathe life into your old laptop.  The very latest, cutting-edge hardware might be problematic at first (for example, at the time of writing, the Thinkpad T60 seems to work better than the T61 with the latest Ubuntu release).  Also, use one of the graphical package management tools, such as Synaptic on Ubuntu, to install all your software.  Synaptic is the precursor to that wonderful bit of nano-tech pie-in-the-sky invention, the feed, where you type in some parameters and exactly what you want appears before you.

And that's what it's about -- getting exactly what you want, for free, and in the process supporting a community of minds that are rethinking everything and openly sharing these thoughts.  It feels good, not like a commitment at all really, more like liberation.  So free yourself.  Commit to open source software.

Open Source Arms

This has been around for a little while, but I just heard about it this morning: Open Source Prosthetics.  It seems like the perfect application of open source principles and ideology to hardware.  Prosthetics users exist in one of the many niche medical markets not sufficiently supported by the industry.  Their needs are very specific and it is often not profitable for large companies to concentrate on the unique needs of few.  Open source principles, the massively collaborative nature of the internet, and rapid manufacturing techniques will open up hardware markets, "filling the needs of niche communities like amputees or developing technologies that are societally beneficial but were previously considered unprofitable (quoted from here)."  With the Open Source Prosthetics Project, we're now seeing regular do-it-yourselfers, engineers, and hobbyists who depend on prosthetics coming up with innovations that will change their lives.

Additionally, this project reflects the larger DIY and openness trends we're seeing on the internet, as well as the idea discussed here that customers will threaten every producer.  All of this is bolstered by the sense of honesty, approachability, and humor shown on the project's site--Their slogan is "Prosthetics shouldn't cost an arm and a leg," and they have a discussion topic called "Pimp My Arm."

In Support of Sustainability, Part 3

Spectacles are rooted in who we are and what drives us, our collective mythology, and our fears.  They often enforce ideas we depend on.  They touch us individually and collectively.  They rise from the instance when everyone realizes the power in cooperation and collaboration.

Burning Man and Critical Mass are examples of this type of spectacle and both have the human relationship to our planet as core principles.  For Burning Man it's about a community of thousands surviving in a place that mother nature seems to have forgotten.  People at Burning Man work together to live for a week in the desert, at the same time acting out something at the heart of their individuality (creating art, trading, dressing up, etc).  Critical Mass, though effectively shut down by the police in New York City, is gaining popularity throughout the world. Once a month, bicyclists get together to have fun, to support the environment, and to advocate for alternative forms of transportation. People gather for different reasons, but they use their collective power to take the streets back from automobiles.

The Green Imperative, an interesting book that shows the part designers must play in protecting and promoting the environment, reminds us that no matter how we identify ourselves, we all have a role.  We can all incorporate sustainability into what we do, as individuals, for the collective good.  It's the same sort of idea that drives an ethical spectacle.  It defines a perspective from which we should view the rest of the world. For example, as a software engineer who depends on powerful, energy-eating machines for my livelihood, what can I do to support sustainability?  Whatever it is I do, it should be something that is unique to my position and my special set of skills as an engineer (simply recycling my garbage is not enough).  It is in this way that sustainability should be built, from the bottom up, into future spectacles.

The internet as great collaboration network has the seeds for many emerging spectacles:  The free software movement a la Linux, GPL, sourceforge, and so on; The DIY movement which is manifesting itself to the masses via Make Magazine, Etsy, Instructables, and the like.  Both of these movements have sustainability and especially re-use at their core.  When a Make Magazine reader sees an Altoids box, they think "What can I make with that?" The subtext is, "I could throw this away, but I will use it for something new" and so, without even realizing it, the inventor is promoting sustainability. For her, it is hard-wired.

To have sustainability as a core part of a movement and to have that movement become spectacle is my hope. With Al Gore's work, we have already seen the beginning.  The free software movement is growing, as is the  DIY movement, Critical Mass, and Burning Man.  As ideas of sustainability capture more of the public eye, there will be a snowball effect and more spectacles will emerge that will incorporate both our individual and collective connection to the earth.

Green Electronics

I was cruising some environmental websites this morning and I stumbled across this article about greener electronics.  Batteries and the electronic devices they power do bad bad things to the earth once they are thrown away.  Electronic devices also consume power which usually means carbon-dioxide emissions.  And many of us don't think about the resources used to make something like a cell phone--For example, Taiwanese chip manufacturers put a huge burden on the country's fresh water supply.  Who, even among residents of Taiwan during a drought, realize the impact of electronics on water supplies?

Luckily there is quite a bit we can do as consumers of electronic devices to help the situation.  Greenpeace ranks electronics companies' "greenness" based on a number of factors.  The results are surprising: "Lenovo soars, Apple bombs."  Consider this the next time you're choosing a new laptop.  Treehugger has an entire guide about what you can do to "green your electronics".  What do you do with your batteries when they die?

Industry giants are realizing the consumer-driven trend toward green.  In an NPR piece I heard this morning, members of the Green Grid are meeting in Denver today to discuss industry standards for power conservation.

As consumers demand greener electronics and greener practices from electronics manufacturers, companies are falling in line.  I hope things continue to move in this direction and I believe they will.

In Support of Sustainability, Part 2

Al Gore's next ethical spectacle will take place on 7/7/07.  The event has it's conceptual roots in Live Aid, a cross-continent rock concert held in 1985 to help raise funds and awareness about the famine in Ethiopia.  This new event, 22 years later, is called Live Earth.  Live Earth is a massive, 24-hour, multi-venue, global concert to raise awareness of environmental issues and in particular those issues related to climate change.

This is truly an ethical spectacle, yet it is very different than the spectacle of An Inconvenient Truth.  A rock concert, first of all, can never be as didactic as a documentary film.  However, little in the world is so deeply rooted in spirituality than music.  Whereas you'll never learn a whole lot from a music event, it will probably touch you at a more fundamental level than a documentary ever could.  A music event alone, however, doesn't constitute spectacle.  But one on this scale surely does.

Besides the largeness of the event and the spiritual significance of music, there are other aspects of Live Earth that are promising.  The event will be held in 7 continents on a date represented by three sevens.  The significance of this seems entirely manufactured, but the effect is as if there was some deeper meaning than just dates and numbers.  There will be over 100 performers and, judging by the marketing from Live Earth's partner MSN (unfortunately), viewers will be able to watch any of the acts live on the internet.

The upshot is we have a spiritual event of mythological proportions (has there ever been anything so big?) where individuals get to participate at their discretion from their own homes.  It's nearly the perfect synergy of myth, inclusiveness, and connectedness that a fully-realized ethical spectacle calls for.  Perhaps this is the type of thing that only someone like Al Gore can pull off, but in my search for more spectacles in support of sustainability, I see the beginning other, more bottom-up movements that have the requisite mythological undertones, promote inclusiveness and individual control, and advance connectedness and sustainability.  I will discuss these movements next time.

In Support of Sustainability, Part 1

Last week in Slate there was an article about a book called Dream, by Stephen Duncombe, which looks at the failings of the contemporary progressive movement. According to the article, Duncombe argues that modern-day progressives need a "spectacle" rooted in "story and myth, fears and desire, imagination and fantasy."  Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier show is used as an example of conservatives' understanding of this need.  Similarly, progressives of the past seem to have understood this idea.  The author discusses Rosa Parks for instance--how the act of disobeying a racist law had myth-like consequences.

Al Gore and his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, are also mentioned in the Slate article.  In a way, Al Gore's personal story is similar to the hero myth--The underdog suffers a humiliating defeat and disappears from the public eye for a period of time, presumably to reflect and learn, and then returns to share what he's learned in the hope of helping the world. His documentary is a true example of the type of spectacle Duncombe describes.  The film juxtaposes Gore's personal story with the story of the planet.  The shared mythological undertones demonstrate the connectedness of the planet with human life and the uniqueness of humanity.  Yet, for better or for worse, the film plays on our darker emotions such as fear.  How powerful fear is!  A point reiterated by the chilling spectacle of Gore raising himself up on a lift to show us how carbon dioxide levels are literally off the chart.  He shocks us with before and after pictures of receding glaciers and then asks us to imagine what will happen if our sea levels rise 20 feet.

Clearly, spectacle can be a powerful way to promote whatever ideas one wishes to further, provided that in some way the spectacle is tied to mythology and our collective dreams.  Duncombe might call a spectacle like one that promotes sustainability and environmentalism an ethical spectacle, one that furthers inclusivity and openness as opposed to hiding the truth, one that perhaps removes fear from the equation.

I sometimes feel a mythological and dreamlike connection to the natural enviroment which I attribute to growing up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains so I feel there must be a better way to affect change in the way we live without resorting to scare tactics.  Fear seems to add fuel to the political fire for an issue that I would like to see less politicized.  Perhaps the ends justifies the means, but I'm looking for signs of a different kind of spectacle.

Marketers Hate You

It's ok, they hate me too.  I can tell that marketers hate us because they are constantly attempting to distill whatever demographic we belong to into simple slogans, product lines, and ad campaigns.  To them we are merely consumers: giant wallets with tiny brains and no free will; sheep, to be herded into groups and manipulated en masse.

Case in point is Calvin Klein's new fragrance for hip twenty-year-olds called CK in2u, which I read about in the New York Times last week.  CK in2u is the successor to the wildly successful CK-1 which was popular in the mid 90's.  Calvin Klein is courting a demographic they call the technosexual.  It's a self-serving label. Sex is easy to wrap up and sell.  Calvin Klein has access to beautiful models and can capitalize on the implicit promise that if you use CK in2u, you'll get some. According to the New York Times, "A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: 'She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.'"  This is fantasy and the DIY generation, the "technosexuals", won't buy it.

Technically savvy twenty-somethings are just too well informed for such an obvious and insulting ad campaign.  They can learn about Neil Postman with a quick search of Wikipedia and corporate viral ad campaigns are old news.  They will not have their consent manufactured by ads featuring gaunt teenage models.  They want to think, not to be thought for.

Mostly, though, they want control--control over the product, the style, and the message.  This is something that we will talk a lot about in this blog.  The technically savvy are all about control.  It's not about group or demographic ownership, but personal ownership.  They blog because they want to get their voice out there. They think they are unique.  Their community participation is bottom-up whereas ad campaigns like that of CK in2u are top-down.

How you open up a fragrance line, I don't know.  I write software and in software it's easy (open source and public API's for example). However, one way to get started in both product categories is to be less hostile towards the purchaser.  Treat them more like producers than consumers.  Don't distill their motivations into sex and only sex.  Let them create their own real groups instead of joining some make-believe idealized club.  Finally, don't hate the people who you want buying your products.  They know all the tricks and they can smell the hatred a mile away.

Abandoned on the Rails

So, you've chosen a free and open platform for your software development.  This platform is somewhat new, and growing pains are to be expected, but you've calculated it's possible shortcomings and you've determined that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.  The community seems supportive and vibrant and in your estimation, things are just going to get better.

Months go by and things are progressing well.  A new version of the platform is announced and you anxiously await it's release.  When it is finally released, there's a blog entry, a list of changes, and finally a new edition of a book for you to buy.  So, you go for the upgrade and everything breaks.  That, too, is to be expected.  According to the blog entry, it should be easy enough using all of the automated tests you wrote to pinpoint the few problems and whip your app back into shape.  Hm, the best laid plans...

You soon discover that some major things have changed drastically.  Moreover, you find out that those flashy powerful tools you leveraged to get your app off the ground quickly were "only ever really intended as a demonstration."  That's news to you and as the sense of abandonment sets in, you decide to find solace in the community and so you drop an email on a newsgroup. But nobody responds and so your sense of abandonment grows.

It's similar to traveling in a foreign country--when you take the road less traveled and the guide book is useless and the last time you saw an English speaker was two days ago at some dumpy border-town hostel.  You have to trust yourself 'cause doubtless you'll learn something, no matter what happens.  And when you do, and you come back to civilization, you can teach others what you've learned (I will mention here that I'm still in the enchanted forest with my current issues, but when I come out the other side, I pledge to share what I've learned in this blog).  And so hopefully the next lonely soul traveling down that road less traveled won't feel so abandoned.

Where's the Humanity?

If you are a Windows user then you might not believe me, but I have found the human factor in software.  The first inkling of this discovery was when someone plainly said to me, "well, you work with people, don't you?"  I had just said that I thought software development wasn't human enough.  I don't really even know what I meant by that.  It was a hard-to-describe feeling, but my friend saw right through it.  He reminded me that I do work with people, and it's one of the best things about my job.

As soon as I saw one byte of humanity, I started seeing more.  It occurred to me that the purpose of most software is to interface humans with very powerful thinking machines.  The best software for humans is the kind where the interface is complimentary and not adversarial.  When it comes down to it, making machines more human is the end-game for software engineers. Then there is the communicative nature of the internet which has fed the social nature of the web.  When it comes to the web, it's all about connecting humans--to their media, to the things they want to buy, and more and more, to each other.  Human software is social software.  It creates communities.

If we're bound for the Age of Spiritual Machines, it seems that human software is the road that will get us there.  Recently my friend's brother bought him a World of Warcraft character for about $100 on eBay.  My friend and his brother wanted to spend time together, and considering they live in different parts of the country, World of Warcraft was a great venue.  It also gave the brothers a chance to relive their childhood relationship as adults.  The big brother was happy for a new chance to show his little brother the ropes of this virtual world. Now, when my friend shares his online experiences with me, he often talks about the things he and his brother can do and not the things their characters do.  It's almost like a new version of the Turing test: Can the virtual world fool you into thinking your avatar is you?

It's impossible to talk about this without mentioning the Nintendo Wii.  The more social "party games" that have long been Nintendo's focus plus the Wii's brand new way of playing are an auspicious mix.  Accelerometers and motion sensors have been around for a while, but the real magic of the Wii is in the software.  How does some motion of your hand affect what happens in the game and does it make sense?  Thinking about World of Warcraft and the Wii, it is no surprise that games are leading the way in bringing the human factor into software.

Another development that has had a big impact on me as a software engineer is the popularity of Ruby.  Ruby claims to be the programmer's programming language.  Like the Wii, it is fun and intuitive to use.  Its flexibility and elegant syntax is, well, very human.  If you agree with the viability of a bottom up approach, then you can argue that writing software in a more human language will lead to more human software.  I think, with the many new web applications written in Ruby on Rails sprouting up lately, Ruby has helped make software more human.

I can't predict what comes after World of Warcraft, Ruby, and the Wii, but it will inevitably be more natural, more inuitive, and more human.

Become a Software Engineer

Last year, Money Magazine rated software engineer the best job in America.  When I read that, I was incredulous.  I'm a software engineer, I thought, and my job cannot be the best job in America.  My first question was, where do they come up with this crap? Luckily the information architects predicted that it would be my first question and left a link dangling right there in front of me.

It seems one of the most important factors for them is job growth.  This is why chief executive is further down the list than physician assistant.  They also don't include very rare jobs, regardless of how sweet. Superhero and rock-god are nowhere on the list.  Compensation is important, but the human factor also plays prominently in their analysis.  They judged factors such as "stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field."

When viewing the career of software engineering through this lens, it really does make sense.  I was happy to see that the number of software engineering jobs in America is predicted to increase almost 45% over the next 10 years.  Just 5 years ago, outsourcing was predicted to destroy my career.  I guess that was wrong, but those predictions came during a bit of a dark time.  Software engineers and just about everyone else in the industry were suffering from disillusionment after the dot-com crash.  Luckily, the industry and the career has matured since then.  A real understanding in the value of creativity is coming from engineers and their employers.  That brings us to the human factor.  We're beyond the days of thinking that it's all about lines of code.  Because of that, the work has gotten better and so has the job.

At the time I read the Money article, I was working for a company that didn't understand the human factor.  I started working for them because they did travel and I love travelling (This is another point the Money article brings up, that as software engineers we can conflate other interests with out careers--travel, music, you name it, they need software).  But they viewed programming as lines of code that you could farm off to foreign lands for a fraction of the price.  For much of what they do, they can.  But because they treat all of their engineers as hot-swappable resources, they're never going to get much more out of what they are, and what they are is dying.

Of course, if you're in a situation that you think could be better, you should try to find the better, which is what I soon did.  Now I can talk about job growth and compensation in my estimation, but more importantly for me, there's the human factor.  My job has to be creative and interesting and the environment I am in has to facilitate that.  On a good team working on an exciting project for a company that's not trying to institutionalize the creative process, I start to think that Money magazine might just be right.