Nelz' Blog
Ruminations on Development
GIT on Leopard
I had to install the 'git' utility on my OS X (Leopard) box.
I found this blog post to be really helpful... (I just copied and pasted the command-line script, and it just ran and installed fine!)
Compiling Git for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)
Posted at 10:50AM May 14, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Participation Culture
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
WOW! This article is fantastic! I was so psyched after reading this article that I even sent it to my Luddite-ish mother. (After printing the article out and reading it, she said it was 'cute' and reminded her of me... <sigh!>)
I have so much to say about this article, it will probably come out all jumbled... But I hope the reader will be able to pull out some salient points.
Participation
In the vein of where I am going with my ruminations I had actually named this blog post "Participation Culture" before re-reading the article and seeing that "Tim" (O'Reilly, I'm assuming.) has some concept called an "architecture of participation".Participation has been a big theme in my life in recent years. About 6 year ago I fell in with the Burning Man community, whose 10 Principles specifically address participation as a founding pillar. A little over a year ago, I came to the Bay Area and was immediately impressed by all the Makers, teachers, and BarCampers. (As I write this, I am impressed that I continually fall in love with ideas that are only a degree or two away from Tim O'Reilly...)
History of the Participatory Audience
While reading the "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" article, you might be lulled into thinking that audience's radical demand for participation' is an artifact of recent past. Then I got to thinking about the history of our culture's move towards encouraging participation and how little bits of interactivity have made themselves known before the current incarnation of internet culture.Yeah, I agree magicians have been pulling people up on stage forever, but this doesn't count. These types of stage shows are more of an exercise in social engineering than in interactivity.
But, think back to the late-70's. There was a very persistent subsection of our culture who were not willing to sit back and passively watch a show. These people, considered "crazy" by some, would don fishnets and garters and high heels and feather boas to go to a theater to throw bread and yell at the screen and sing along to the music, and some of these people even tromped right up to the front of the theaters to re-enacted exactly what was happening up on the screen at the exact same time. There were, and still are, entire communities built around the pomp and circumstance of late-night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
It tickles me pink that Dr. Frankenfurter, the "sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania", could be a material ancestor for every tweet I Twitter or every Yelp review I post in this "participatory internet".
Epilogue
The Dr. Frankenfurter bit from above is about where I wanted to end up for this post. However, in writing it, I came up with a couple more links for events or shows that I think are incredibly relevant to the article above or to the rest of this post.One of the first shows I ever saw that took a fun step out of the passive-audience experience was the Blue Man Group. My family went to one of their shows in Boston during Christmas time, and I was blown away! At the end of the show, they start unrolling streamers off of toilet paper rollers, covering the audience, getting them to move the streamers forward while strobe lights flash and loudly blaring techno music surrounds you. You are covered and involved in a moving black-lit sea of white streamer paper. I have a distinct memory of jamming out in my seat, looking to my right with the biggest grin on my face and seeing my grandmother get all tangled up in the streamers as they were moving forward. It was a sensory overload, but still one of my most fun memories from my teen years.
I dabbled a little bit in Dungeons and Dragons but it never really 'stuck' with me. However, I don't think anyone can debate that it totally serves as the ancestor of the phenomenon described in the above article as 'sitting in your basement and pretending to be an elf'.
Since I've been in San Francisco, I have totally fallen in love with The Extra-Action Marching Band. Though the Blue Man Group involves the audience at the end of the show, Extra-Action not only breaks, but DEMOLISHES the fourth wall. Through an incredible alchemy of sounds, sweat, and audacity they involve the audience as an integral part of the show. (Disclaimer: not for the claustrophobic.) To friends, I have described the experience of being right up in the front row as being in a mosh pit without any of the anger.
Posted at 07:38PM May 11, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - All Sorts of Database Stuff
"Get Your Database Under Version Control"
- This was the original article, from whence I found all the others in this post.
This 5-part series outlines some great suggestions:
- - "Three rules for database work"
- - "The Baseline"
- - "Change Scripts"
- - "Views, Stored Procedures and the Like"
- - "Branching and Merging"
" SSW Rules to Better SQL Server Databases"
- These hints have some SQLServer specifics, but many of thm can be looked at with DB-agnostic lenses.
Posted at 12:06AM Mar 11, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Users
"I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users"
- This reminds me of the saying "Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can barely hear what you are saying."
Posted at 04:22PM Feb 28, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Hiring, Eye Candy, and Immutable Truth
- Martin Fowler asks "Are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?"
- Everyone's heard of the posting asking for 5-8 years of Java experience when Java was only 3 years old, right?
The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development
- Ignoring these laws always comes back to bite ya...!
- My designer coworkers loved this...
- They dissected the code to figure out the diagonal lines. It turns out the 'secret sauce' is a 20-pixel border with a different colors on horizontal versus the vertical. It seems the border bevels itself when given these parameters.
Posted at 11:52AM Feb 13, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[1]
Links - Testing and Monitoring
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
- Ooooooh, #10! Even web designers are getting on the "testing bandwagon". YAY!
- To me, this story represents an allegory about the importance of good monitoring of incoming URLs.
- This reminds me of a story in "Release It!" (Chapter 7) where a newly deployed site was brought down by all the 'bots' in the open web that were hitting old (and deprecated) URLs. The session load brought by handling all those requests killed their servers.
Posted at 01:32PM Feb 12, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Code Review Comedy and RegEx Evangelism
Posted at 02:41PM Feb 06, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - The Fight for Long-Term Thinking
- Ahhh... A great example of how listening to 'bean counters' encourages short-term thinking.
How to recognise a good programmer:
- I like this post... Hopefully it is true, and not just an example of why I think I'm a good programmer.
Posted at 06:30PM Jan 15, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Compilation
Hrm... No apparent theme to today's link roundup...
- Good points. I gotta keep this link around for the future.
Ten Thousand Hours of Design Reviews:
- WOW! Mathematica has undergone about 10,000 hours worth of design reviews.
- A couple of good examples of how code can be very misleading, and tips on how to avoid the same in your code.
Posted at 06:19PM Jan 14, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Synchronicity...
Geez, Reddit was a raft of apt articles today, dealing with several issues that are coming up in my daily life.
Whatever happened to code reviews?:
- My answer: short-sighted-ness.
- Another thing to think about when working in an environment where there are no code reviews: How are the developers going to grow? If I come in, and day-to-day just keep dropping the same code that I've been dropping, with no one challenging my skills, how am I going to get any better? My personal answer is that I spend out-of-work time pursuing "recreational programming" activities, however I realize that I am the exception to the rule. Most of my peers stagnate, frustrating my growth. And how can "management" ever hope to make any better products than what they've had in the past? The answer seems to be "churn": lose engineers and hope that your next hire will be better than the one departing.
The top 4 things you should never do to your users:
- I shopped this one around my office for a bit, since we are definitely treading on at least 2 of these. And 100% of the responses were along the lines of "But there is a company benefit to it." This makes me ruminate on the difference between a "service organization" and other types of companies.
The 3 Levels of Programmers: The Good, The Bad, and the Lazy:
- I believe I fall *firmly* into the middle tier, though I try to tread into the upper tier every once in a while.
- I wish it wasn't impolite to just run out of the room screaming when someone suggests a "lets-build-it-ourselves" approach.
- I think "crunch mode" and "incentive pay" are two concepts that should be discarded.
Maybe I'm just grouchy today, but I am struck by how many companies embrace short-term thinking, even though they purport to be thinking of long-term goals.
Posted at 01:37PM Jan 11, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]