jr conlin's ink stained banana

i tend to rail against things that try to be "helpful".

You know the type. These are programs that make life "easier" and "assist" you in ways that might be useful once, but soon make you want to hunt down the folks that came up with the idea and beat them with encyclopedias. Like Clippy did.

Not all painfully helpful things are as obvious as Clippy. There are some that are far more insidious, specifically, IDEs.

Why the IDE hate? They're the GPS of Coding. They're useful, to be sure, but i'm not sure it's a good idea to learn how to drive with them, but folks are. Heck, i'm one of them.

With the IDE's, not the driving with GPS. Wait, i have one of those too. Damn, i'll start again.

IDE's biggest problem is that they don't teach you anything. In fact, they kind of keep you from learning. The reason is that with complex languages that need an IDE, you start relying on the IDE to do things like tell you what methods and object are available. This leads to a false sense of understanding about the language because, you can get a program running or fix things, but it's a false knowledge. It's a bit like saying "Oh, i know everything there is to know about Yellowstone. i drove by Old Faithful."

That's not really seeing Yellowstone. You've got to get out of the car, away from the well marked trail and concession stands, and out into the woods. Sure, there are wolves and bears and buffalo that haven't dated in a really, really long time, but that's how you learn important things. Like not to bend over when picking up your honey dipped pet chicken.

The best way to learn a language really is to just grab an editor, a compiler and a debugger. You may also want a Drill Sergeant Phrasebook, but that's optional. It's brutal, nasty, and about as much fun as grabbing a map from the 1960's and trying to navigate downtown Boston. Ok, with less gunfire, but it's about as deep a learning experience, and that sort of education will stay with you forever. Much like the scars from the beer bottle that someone threw at your head.

Ok, so that probably doesn't sound very appealing does it?

Tough, it's good for you.

Unprecedented.

According to the nice folks at mw.com it means: : having no precedent : novel, unexampled. In short: Nothing has ever happened like this before.

It's a rather staggering claim in this modern world, and it tends to be tossed around quite a bit, whether or not it's true.

As a society, we tend to hate history, usually because it disagrees with us. There's also a heck of a lot of it going on. Mind you, 1979 was also the year we were focused on Iran and conservatives coming into power in Britain, as well as a few other things, so if you happen to be younger than 35 or so, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was unprecedented. If not, you've been had. (i'll count myself in that number, since i had also forgotten about it.)

So, being an engineer and realizing that there's a problem, how can we go about fixing this sort of group amnesia? We're a highly connected hive mind, some of us should be big enough neurons to fire off a memory or two about this. Yet, we don't.

i'm starting to think that possibly the luddites might have a point that snippet conversations are bad. Hell, i used to update this blog daily, but it's been nearly two weeks since i wrote anything. Mostly, i've been popping info-zits on twitter or being a cyber potato soaking up random crap from Techmeme and Reddit. i miss writing here because it made me think. Perhaps that effort is what made me stop updating.

Well, enough of that.

Time to prune back the crap to historical levels and get myself back on a schedule again. Time to pay attention again and stop being so damn passive. i've got my well to scream into, but there's more to say and do.

Hi, my name is JR, and i'm a recovering info junkie.

In the office kitchen, the filtered water tap throbs with blue light.

You're perfectly welcome to comment why a business located in Santa Clara county of California even needs a complex multi-phase filtration system in addition to the federal, state and municipally inspected and licensed one that treats all the water in the county, but that's beside the point right now.

The faucet throbs blue.

While it took me a bit to notice this behavior amidst the flood of fluorescent and halogen lights, i couldn't help but wonder just how annoying that would be if i had it at home. That got me thinking about all the various idiot LEDs that we seem to deal with. My monitor has one. A little green LED to let me know that the reason the huge screen is glowing and full of animated text and graphics is because it's powered on. Thank you little 3V LED, i doubt i could have figured that out for myself. My laptop has several including a large blue one to let me know the battery state (Ok, i can kinda understand that one), but does it really need to have another LED indicating that the power is on? One can presume that the blinking wireless status indicator or disk activity lights would probably suffice. That or the green LED indicating that i'm running in "Power Saver" mode. i'll let the irony of that settle in for a second.

There's a small constellation of LEDs in my home indicating that the GPF outlets haven't tripped, my UPS's are turned on, and i swear at least one to indicate that the power LED indicator is working.

Do we really need all these damn lights?

Yes, i know i could solve my problems with a roll of black electrical tape, but it'd be nicer to just have the option to not display that information. Chances are, you're only really going to need to know once or twice, probably within minutes of first plugging the device in. LEDs aren't providing you information, they're being Blinkenlites trying to convince you that "Yes, see how modern and high tech i am? i am covered in Blinkenlites!! i am the most modern and high tech doorstop you've ever seen!"

Oh, and that UPS with the lights to indicate it's on? It also has a way to let you know when it's off. It beeps, loudly, because that's the state you want to pay more attention to.

Honestly, i've been watching the HTML5/Facebook discussions a fair bit lately. Not just because i'm a huge advocate of open protocols and formats over closed environments. Not just because i'm interested in how the public will finally react to the fact that all companies value your privacy, but for many, the real value of that privacy isn't keeping the data secret from everyone else.

Although i'll be interested in watching the firestorm once that little revelation sinks into the farm belt.

No, the real reason i'm interested in following all of this is because i've been running a personal experiment for the past twenty-mumble years. There's a pendulum in computer science that swings back and forth. It generally completes a complete reversal about every three years. That pendulum is the swing between client and server.

About every three years, opinion shifts between "The Client is All Powerful!" to "This Can Only Be Done on the Server!". "Client" in this case is a distributed, loosely connected network of entities, and "Server" is a centralized core which doles out information en mass to dumb clients. This cycle hits nearly every technology that uses the internet at some point. It's just kinda sad when i read articles from folks expressing some concern or uncertainty about what the direction technology is headed.

Originally you had massive VAXen that ruled the land with VT100s slaved to their masters. Then, with the introduction of PCs and smarter terminals, programmers realized that they didn't need "Big Iron" and the clients would rule the world! Then folks realized that clients have limited storage and that those storage requirements could be satisfied by centralized data stores, which could then be distributed to a network of peer machines, which would access central servers for web info, that could be generated on the client's browser, etc. and so on ad infinitum.

So, where is the pendulum now? It's a bit difficult to say, but i'm willing to acknowledge that it's fairly strongly pointing toward "Server". There's Facebook (which holds everyone's identity), Gmail, various API services, and what-not that serve up data to fairly smart, dumb clients. Those clients aren't really doing anything more than displaying the content. There aren't lots of clients that store your Google address book and correspondence history against the associations you've built in Facebook in order to figure out what restaurant on Yelp you should all go try.

The introduction of HTML5 (and more importantly, ECMAScript, localStorage and Credentials), will eventually allow more clients to do more, and slowly shift the pendulum away from "i have to use the Facebook Server because that's where all my friends are!" In many respects, Twitter is ahead of the game in that respect, partly because they're very actively encouraging developers not to just create a stupid client, but do something richer with their API.

Likewise, as crap as i think the iPad is, it's a step toward a smarter, distributed client. Wait, did i just say that? The iPad. The "i can only do one thing, and even then only what Uncle Steve will allow", iPad? Well, yes. Because it's running a fairly advanced platform called WebKit which will allow for applications to be written and work natively. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting fairly close. It's also never going to allow browser apps to do things like connect to peers easily, but that's not going to be a problem for more open devices. In either case, you'll see clients that tie into various data stores and services in order to let you control and mine your own content that's hosted on those remote services.

Of course, by then, folks will probably be talking about some new centralized service that will provide them with a better experience than the confusing, disconnected tech that's built from some amalgamation of data points.

And thus the cycle continues.

i want to write a movie script. i figure that it will take me about an hour. Filming will take maybe three hours with a crew of about ten people, six of whom will do the CGI effects using a copy of MS Paint i've got lying around somewhere. (That runs on this Mac Laptop i found in a thrift shop, right?)

After i copy my masterwork onto a couple of DVDs, i'll head down to my local AMC and tell them that they need to run my movie this Saturday at 6PM because it's a matter of utmost importance. He'll do it, of course, because i'll win him over with my impressive logic and use of lingo like how my movie uses Ambient Accoustive Infractions to tell it's story of Interpersonal Existential Isolationism. i'll be sure to add some lens flares to the disk before i hand it to the guy selling tickets.

This will instantly rocket me to the top of the list of summer blockbusters and garner me the highest award for Movies, an Emmy.

And when i'm done, i'll turn to the various collected Hollywood writers, directors and producers and tell them that what they're feeling right now (that mixture of nausea, seething rage, and lunatic laughter at the sheer impossibility of what i've done), is exactly what i feel every time i sit through one of their movies and they play fast and loose with computers/science/biology/sanity.

(i mean, i get needing to tech the tech with techy tech, but please don't inject the hero with things that would make him explode, or have him create new unstable elements in his basement by directing a raw neutron beam. Points for being at least close on that, but i don't believe Fermi or most of what remained of Malibu would have approved )